A Trip to Oxford to Visit Augusta

If you’re not a vegetarian, I think ya just gotta be impressed with a place that can pull off a duck and asparagus omelet for a Sunday brunch. Augusta, the newest and perhaps only restaurant in Oxford, Iowa, can do just that. My friend Elizabeth and I were duly impressed by the specials, if less so by the young bus-girl crumpling up the large paper tablecloth at the next table down. Besides, ya gotta figure that any place that can pull off a duck and asparagus omelet for Sunday brunch can pull off French toast and sausage.

Well, not so fast.

The story behind Augusta is that a couple Hurricane Katrina refugees returned to their Iowa roots, met a business partner in Oxford, and set up a bistro with a small town location but with Big Easy flair. Rave reviews are proliferating on the web since their opening in January of 2008.

My friend and I liked Augusta… in the end… overall. It was good but quirky, the problem being that the quirks weren’t all of the charming variety. Uncharming quirks may be better known as annoyances. We might have had an overly romantic idea as we set of on the fifteen mile westward drive from Iowa City, thru Tiffin, to Oxford. We wanted to feel like we were driving to some unknown culinary jewel lost in the backwaters of Iowa – a place with charming tablecloths and leisurely feasting and old world charm, not to a small town diner with a competent chef and local high school girls as wait staff. Arriving we were met by a gregarious woman who smiled but unceremoniously deposited us at a table topped with a large sheet of paper by the door. The interior was quaint in a neuvo-rustic sort of way, and I got the feeling that it might develop a bit more over time as it settled into its style and developed its wait staff. The farmland bistro atmosphere extended through the single rectangular room with the bar and kitchen at the far end and a number of smallish tables which they didn’t mind pushing together.

The waitress mentioned a few an impressive sounding specials, all of which were still available even tho at a bit past 1:00, we were perhaps the last customers to arrive. Elizabeth went for the Duck omelet - to which they offered to add whatever other traditional omelet stuffings she wanted – and sides of fruit and a pancake. What I liked about the menu for the regular breakfasts is that they all came with three sides. That’s right – uno, dos, tres.. This means that one doesn’t have to choose between the biscuits and gravy and whatever else looks tempting, or try to get a single biscuit and gravy along with the meal. One can simply order the French toast and get biscuits and gravy, cheesy grits, and AND sausage on the side, then eat the bacon that your friend gets with her omelet. I was smiling, but all the while thinking of the damage I would do to my heart.

The bacon was fine, better than average even; good but otherwise unremarkable. Nothing else was what I expected – the aforementioned quirks. The biscuits were almost scones, layered and flaky inside, browned outside, but strangely sweet and a bit dry, not I thought a great match for the gravy, which was a bit thin but very rich. The cheese grits I had expected maybe in a bowl or maybe on the plate, but definitely scooped out of a pot and amorphous. They arrived in a sharply geometric triangle, seemingly deep fried, and potentially pre-formed and just taken out of a deep freeze, with a crispy outer coating and mushy interior. Nott bad, but not super, and definitely quirky the wrong way. The home-made sausage had an interesting flavor – very, very peppery with black pepper, not hot but biting. It was a very fine grind with an interesting round along one edge and flat along the opposite edge crispy not on top and bottom but around the outside, that led me to suspect it was cooked as a meatloaf and sliced. It was okay but not especially to my liking – too dense and too peppery, didn’t go well with syrup – but definitely distinctive.

The French toast was the thing that was most disappointing in a way, although it also partly redeemed itself in another. Again, this may be a personal preference, so I’ll try to explain. I think to be good French toast needs to be soaked in the batter long enough to soak it up. It doesn’t need to be so saturated that it resembles some custardy bread pudding slice, but the grilled bread with a thin shellacking of egg on the outside and a cooked dry interior that some places try to pawn off as French toast is a crime against breakfast. Augusta’s variety was closer to the latter, and disappointing on that front. But it wasn’t the average white bread, either. In fact, the French toast was made out of something almost resembling brioche, soft and moist and a bit eggy. It almost made up for the lack of saturation of the batter. But only almost.

I think our disappointment came from overly high hopes, and as I said earlier, in the end, we liked Augusta. I like the idea of Augusta, and I like the drive to Oxford. We’re thinking about going back next weekend. I hope that some of the quirks will seem more familiar and others will have been changed. I want to support a small town diner that knows its crowd yet maintains its ambition to be something other than another small town diner.