jimmypribble.com/blog

The last few weeks have been a little rough (<-subliminal plug?) and since I have been doing all of the house-husband chores like grocery shopping, I decided to treat myself to some comfort food, namely - a Nighthawk Steak 'n Taters frozen dinner. I hadn't had one since my original review in 2005. In that review, I commented on the steak sauce coming in a condiment package:

This is what I wrote:

“An even bigger difference is the steak sauce, which now comes in a small condiment packet. The steak sauce used to already be on the steak. In fact, I would scrape any frozen steak sauce which had stuck to the back of the cardboard cover, back onto the steak. Like the suggested side salad, the optional steak sauce is a nod towards healthy eating and I think it was the right thing to do (though really, if you have any kind of dietary restrictions or concerns, you shouldn’t even be looking at one of these things).

…I’m only asking for things to be the way they were.”

And this is what I saw when I pulled the dinner tray from the box this evening:

The steak sauce was already on the steak! This makes me happy for a couple of reasons. First, I will always use the sauce, so this saves me from having to fish the packet out from behind the plastic. Second, the reduction in packaging is a positive environmental step. And finally, I am going to pretend that the reason they changed back was because they read my review and said to themselves - we had better change back, because that powerful blogger likes things the way they used to be! He could ruin us!

I have some other comments about my earlier review. I noticed that for some reason, I was stingy with the photos in that post. So, I have added a photo of the plated dinner. Also, like all blogs, this site gets hundreds and hundreds of spam comments and they all come-in on that one post. I still can’t figure that one out.

I mentioned in the Nighthawk review that I would do reviews of other foods from my childhood, but I haven’t gotten around to it. Maybe on my next shopping trip, I’ll take a look at the current state of children’s breakfast cereal and pick-up some samples for review.

jimmy

With my house cracking apart, I was even more eager to get away this past weekend for some fresh air and the open road. So, Friday afternoon, I loaded-up the Miata and pointed her towards Rising Star, Texas, where I would meet my friend David Sylvester for some dove hunting. I’m not much of a hunter. I have been out with Dave half a dozen times and haven’t bagged a single anything, most of the time because I never saw anything. But that has always been a secondary consideration for me. Hunting has always been about getting outside, drinking beer, shooting firearms, and basically doing things that would make Ted Nugent proud. Not bathing for a few days is just a bonus. Anyway, this would be my first dove hunt; maybe I would have better luck this time.

I stopped to have lunch in Lampasas and review the burger at Storm’s:

Storm’s is legendary around Central Texas. I swear, any time that I hear anyone mention Lampasas, the very next words I hear are, “Did you go to Storm’s?” It could be a conversation between two people, or you can just walk outside and mutter “Lampasas” under your breath and a passerby in a car will call out, “Hey, be sure to go to Storm’s!” I’m not kidding. Go try it. So, inspired by the Texas Burger Guy (TBG) blog that I stumbled upon recently, I decided to stop and see what all the fuss is about.

A quick note about my review style. I hope to submit my review to TBG as a guest reviewer, so I will try to follow TBG review rules.

Storm’s has been serving burgers at their original Lampasas location for over 50 years. Originally called Dairy Cue, it sounds suspiciously like Storm’s started life as one of the many Dairy Queen knockoff restaurants that are strewn around small towns in Texas (Dairy King, Dixie Queen, Daisy Queen, et al). Dairy Cue, or Dairy Q? No matter, Jim Storm and his family were setting themselves apart serving quality burgers and attracting legions of loyal fans, including perhaps the most famous gourmand in history - Elvis Presley, who is said to have frequented the establishment while stationed at Fort Hood.

Old School Drive-In

New School Patio

The original Storm’s is a drive-in and still has the look of a bona fide burger joint. But they also have a new patio across the parking lot for those wanting to “dine-in.” The patio is contemporary and clean, with a fountain made from Llanite and landscaping that uses native Texas plants. To be honest, the patio didn’t look very “burger joint” at all, but the fact that they chose to keep the original drive-in alongside the new structure, shows their solid values and commitment to their own heritage. Okay, I can feel TBG getting impatient; let’s get to the food.

The menu is simple and features the Storm’s Special - a 1/2 pound, triple-meat cheeseburger and fries. If they say it’s special, then that’s what I want. I placed my order from the patio, using the same intercom and menu system found in the drive-in stalls. In just a few minutes, I was served. My initial observation was that the burger came wrapped in paper rendered clear from the grease. I wondered if I could get an angioplasty in Lampasas.

Click here for 1600 x 1200.

Undeterred, I unwrapped the burger. I had ordered the special without pickles or onion, which is my custom, and this is what was left: three beef patties, one slice of American cheese, shredded lettuce, tomato, and mustard, on a lightly toasted white bun that looked like it had been run over by a truck. This was a good burger, maybe even a very good burger, but I would stop short of saying that it was a great burger. Maybe it just goes against too many of my preferences. For instance, the fact that it is a triple-burger might sound impressive at first, but the individual patties are thinner than the ones found in an Elementary School cafeteria. They are so thin that it would be impossible not to overcook them, which is the real problem here. If anything, one of the valid reasons for having multiple patties, is to increase the cheese to beef ratio, but Storm’s only has one slice of cheese to hold together three patties (obviously, extra cheese is available). I also prefer to have my vegetables on top of the burger, rather than beneath it. It’s a small thing, but it does matter. Let’s run down the TBG categories:

Ooze Factor
Let’s talk about ooze for a second. There is good ooze and there is bad ooze. The best ooze is the cow juice from a nice medium-rare to medium burger. To a degree, grease can be good ooze. Bad ooze is a wet burger from watery vegetables. This was a medium-wet burger, but there was very little cow juice. The ooze was mostly from grease and wet vegetables. If you like grease, this is another advantage to a triple-burger, especially if it’s fried - there are six sides of burger holding grease for you. I’m going to go straight down the middle on this.
Ooze Factor Rating: 5

Herd Killer
No mystery here; this burger is a 1/2 pounder. With more patties to cook-down, I bet it comes out less than a single 1/2 pound burger when it’s served.
Herd Killer Rating: 4

Handling
This burger was very easy to handle. By design or by accident, this burger was squished-down flat, which made for good maneuverability and easy ingress. It had good ergonomics, but was not very impressive looking.
Handling Rating: 4

Bling Bling
My total bill was just over $5, an incredible bargain. Also, to aid in digestion and to keep my blood thin enough to hopefully stave off an aneurysm, I ordered water with my meal and they gave me a huge, Super Big Gulp sized cup, which I thought was unusually generous. However, I noticed that there was a $.50 charge for any substitution, no matter the item. I can admire that concept from the standpoint of this being a burger joint (”You get what you get,” according to Alan Richman), but I have to dock them under this category. It would be silly to charge me $.50 for tater tots instead of fries.
Bling Bling Rating: 8

Gravedigger
Half a pound of meat and a little grease isn’t enough to get me too worried. If you think food is going to kill me, you haven’t seen me drive. This was less than an hour later with the top down and the little tin can getting blown all over the road:

Storm’s Gravedigger Rating: 4 shovels
Jimmy’s Driving Gravedigger Rating: 9 shovels

Overall Storm’s Special Burger Rating: 5

This is a case where an overall rating might make a burger look poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. As I said before, this is a good burger, especially when considering other factors of the dining experience. First and foremost are the fries. The fries are outstanding. They are fresh cut and fried in the skin to a perfect level of crispiness and saltiness. The only thing I found unusual was the fact that I found a packet of ketchup at the bottom of my pile of fries, like the prize at the bottom of a cereal box, when it was too late to use it. I couldn’t tell if that was a Storm’s custom, or just a fluke. I don’t usually put ketchup on my fries, so it really didn’t matter.

Finally, on my way back home a couple of days later, I stopped at the Storm’s in Burnet to check the consistency between the two locations. I ordered the exact same thing, except that I also ordered a vanilla malt. The burger and fries were exactly as I had found them in Lampasas (except no ketchup packet prize). The malt was thick and delicious. In fact, it was so thick that I couldn’t figure out why they bothered having an “extra thick” option, which I didn’t try. I suppose it comes as a solid, rather than a liquid.

There are Storm’s locations in Lampasas, Burnet, Hamilton, Kingsland, and Marble Falls. For more information, check their website at www.stormsrestaurants.com.

Overall Rating for Storm’s: 7 

After lunch, I turned up 183 and continued heading north. The weather was stunning and the roads were clear. I found that with the top down, but the side windows up, I could cruise comfortably at fairly high speeds. I still had On The Road in my CD player, but there was no hope of hearing anything but subliminal whispers from it.

This might sound a bit strange, but I love the Southern Gothic dilapidation found in small Texas towns and the adjoining countryside. I love the abandoned shops and the broken barns. I love the fallen stables and the (not really so) ancient stone walls. I love the faded signs of times past. I stopped in Zephyr, Texas and snapped some photographs of the Miata in front of such a building.

Click here for bigger. 

I also snapped some fashion shots of the car at our final destination - the hunting camp, which is a boxcar located in the middle of the lease property as if set down by the same mischievous UFO that dropped a boat in the middle of a desert in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Now with Super Shock Control!

I arrived before anyone else, so I had a chance to just sit back, crack open a beer and dig into a book. Despite the mild weather and a gentle breeze, the afternoon sun eventually made me tired, so I dug around in the boxcar until I found a hammock. I tied it between a couple of trees and lay in the shade until Steven Sylvester and his stepson Riley drove up. We unpacked their truck and visited for awhile until the sun started to drop and then we geared-up for an evening hunt. Just as we were driving off, Steven’s best friend, Sam Roach, drove into camp. Within a half hour, the four of us were setup near a tank under a tree line where the doves were known to roost for the night. We waited for them to fly in. When they finally came, Sam and Riley each got a bird, but Steven and I were shooting blanks. We each mumbled something about the beer.

It seems migratory birds are completely safe from me as they appear to be small enough to evade my target locking computer. The same cannot be said for the cute, fuzzy bunny rabbit that Riley flushed out of the brush for me, though. The rabbit ran straight at me and fearing death at the end of sharp, pointed teeth, I was forced to defend myself.

We got back to camp and Sam showed me how to clean the rabbit. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Riley and I built a fire and Steven grilled steaks for everyone. He also grilled the two birds they had got that day. He put the meat into jalepeños and wrapped them with bacon. Delicious. David eventually arrived late in the evening. We told him what had happened and then we turned-in so we could get up early for the morning hunt.

The morning hunt didn’t go as well. I think Sam got another bird, but they were scarce. We spent the rest of the day walking David’s new property. He and his wife just closed on a property about half an hour from the lease. Dave plans to just hunt the property, but eventually they will build and probably retire there. It was a very nice plot. Unfortunately, walking around in the woods was starting to take its toll on me and I developed a fairly righteous allergy attack and I had left all of my meds back at the camp. When we drove into town for lunch, I stopped in a grocery store and bought some Benadryl. When I walked up to the checkout to pay, the cashier and the bag boy acted like I was some kind of alien. The cashier had no qualms at all about checking me out, looking hard up and down as if to say, “What is your story.” Sure, I was in my hunting drag, which is really just my Air Force BDU, except that I can’t button the top button on my trousers anymore. And I was wearing a hat, so my hair couldn’t have been too bad. I just couldn’t figure out what she was looking at. The bag boy (who was really on the verge of being a bag man) kept grinning at me like an idiot. When he asked me if I wanted paper or plastic, I said I didn’t need either and that I would just walk out with it. Then he laughed and pointed at me as if I had said the funniest thing he had ever heard.

Later, we went back to camp and shot skeet to practice for the evening hunt. As usual, I did very well shooting skeet, but I still couldn’t bring down a bird. One time, after another wave of birds had flown safely past us, I turned to Dave and expressed some frustration.

“No dude, you clipped that last one. I saw it.”

Just about then soft, downy feathers began falling gently all around us like snowflakes. I had indeed clipped a bird and the wind had blown his feathers back over us. It was surreal and funny. I never did get a dove, but the other guys each got at least one.

The next day, after another lame morning hunt, we got out our frustration by going redneck and shooting inanimate objects at the camp. Dave shot an old pair of his boots. The best though was an old TV that somebody had brought. We set it up on a chair and I went after it with my 9mm. I didn’t think it would do much…but it did. Then we stepped it up by shooting it with Sam’s AR-15. Finally, we went absolutely medieval by shooting 00 magnum loads at it with a 12 ga. shotgun. We obliterated that TV. I suppose one could argue that we were making a social statement about being outdoors vs. staying indoors, but more realistically we were probably just making a statement about us wanting to shoot up stuff.

It was a great trip.

After I got home, I checked the Internet for rabbit stew recipes, read about six of them, took the elements I liked, and then struck-out on my own. I cook by feel, so don’t expect any measurements. Here is what I did:

1 rabbit
vegetable oil
flour
red wine
potatos
carrots
red (purple) onion
bella mushrooms
2 cans beef stock
salt
pepper

Salt, pepper, and brown both sides of the rabbit in a large frying pan. Then put the rabbit in a crock pot with diced potatos, carrots, bella mushrooms, and anything else you want in your stew. I like to keep it simple. In the frying pan, make a roux out of the remaining vegetable oil, flour, salt, and pepper. Add sliced purple onion and red wine. Reduce. Add beef stock and reduce until you have the consistency you want. Pour the reduction into the crock pot and cook everything on low for a couple of hours. I was going to cook it for two, but it ended-up being three because I went into my office to work on this entry, drank the rest of the bottle of red wine that I had used to cook, and lost track of time.

I took the rabbit out of the crock pot and pulled the meat off of the bone. The stew would probably be best served with/on biscuits, but I’m too lazy, so I had mine with toast points. Okay, they weren’t really points, I just tore up a couple of slices of toast and threw them in the bowl. I thought the stew was quite good. In fact, I wouldn’t change anything except that I would start earlier and cook it longer. It wasn’t undercooked by any means, but if left in the crock pot longer (say, eight hours), the meat would be even more tender. The stew was even better a day later. And the day after that.

jimmy      

On Saturday night, Mrs. Pribble and I walked into the Old San Francisco Steak House, her for the first time and both of us for the last. The Old San Francisco Steak House (OSF) had been bought and would close its doors forever on Sunday, after 25 years in business. Remarkably, except for some very small details, everything was as I had left it. The decor was exactly the same, down to the period artifacts and artwork, dominated by the huge portrait of Gussie Lee (the legendary inspiration for the restaurant), all designed to evoke the Gay Nineties. The creaking of the brass-handled front doors, first the outer and then the inner, reminded me of a time when those sounds would cue my service to new dinner guests.

Our own fellow dinner guest and OSF alumnus, Mat Farabee, hadn’t arrived yet, so we stood back and watched the manager at the helm of the slowly sinking ship. As happens so often in these sad situations, formality had broken-down and the employees joined the customers as bystanders to an event outside of their control. The manager, who wasn’t wearing any kind of uniform whatsoever (a far cry from the days when my boss and I would man the reservation desk in tuxedos), openly commiserated with the guests waiting in the lobby. She had moved from Dallas for the job just a year before and couldn’t help the frustration creep into her voice when talking about uprooting herself for what was probably then an already doomed business. The end came so quickly and without warning, that our waiter had been hired only three weeks before. I was also startled to hear the manager explain the fate of the other OSF locations. I had just been to the OSF website (while it lasts) and it still showed three locations and another coming soon. I figured the Austin location closing was a unique case, but I was wrong. The Houston location closed a year ago to make way for a Super Target, the Dallas location closed early this year to become a strip club, and the Austin and San Antonio locations would be closing on the same day. OSF really was over. If Mat didn’t hurry, our dinner plans would be over, too. Every few minutes, somebody would come from the kitchen and announce what food they had run out of and the manager would add it to the long list on a whiteboard they had set up in the lobby. Cuts of meat were starting to show up on the list - surely a bad sign.

While we were waiting, in swished Bernice, the only employee who had been at the Austin location since day one and only one of two remaining employees from my days back in the eighties. Bernice was in her hostess outfit, a long black satin dress and white feather boa, looking like an older Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke. She had let her red hair go pure white, but otherwise looked exactly the same. We greeted each other and promised to catch-up later in the evening. Mat finally arrived and we were seated.

The main dining room (or “red room” as we used to call it) and the green room also looked almost exactly as I remembered. The red room is two stories tall and the walls covered floor to ceiling with kitschy period advertisements, signs, and other memorabilia, with a bison head and two or three steer heads mounted for good measure. The room is otherwise dominated by a full-length bar across the front of the room, on which is a piano (there used to be two) and hanging above it all - the red velvet swing. Every hour or so, a “swinger” dressed in a burlesque-style little red dress, fishnet stockings, and garter belt, would entertain guests by swinging higher and higher to the piano accompanyment of ragtime music, until she reached the top of her two story arc, the music would crescendo, and she would kick a cowbell mounted to the ceiling to the delight of all. I scoffed at the red velvet swing now being equipped with a seatbelt, but both swingers of the evening performed well, even to the mostly empty room.

We had an 8 o’clock reservation and were sat around 8:30. Our waiter informed us that they were out of T-bones. I told him that he should consult the list in the lobby, because they were out of much more than that. He scurried off to catch-up on the latest bad news, while I wondered how long OSF had been using waiters. In my day, despite the illegality of it, the OSF only hired waitresses. That was why waiting tables at OSF was the one job that I hadn’t done. I had been a busboy, food expo guy, dishwasher, valet, line-cook, salad/dessert prep cook, flambé cook, bartender, and host. I even mowed the grass a few times and one time another busboy and I spent our day stealing huge chunks of limestone from a construction site to use for the OSF landscaping. But I never waited on a table. Speaking of waitresses, I also noticed that the uniforms had changed. The waitresses used to wear basically the same outfit as a swinger: low-cut little black dresses, fishnet stockings, black shoes and a garter belt. At some point (perhaps with the arrival of waiters), this had been replaced with black pants, white shirt and a vest. Sigh. I understand, I really do. But you must understand that to a 15 year old boy, watching waitresses (mostly college girls) in those uniforms made working at OSF one of the best jobs I…er, I mean he could ever have. Mat seconded this notion adding that standing at his station at the end of the bar, watching the pretty swingers twirl over his head and waiting for a flambé order so that he could go and set stuff on fire, really was the best.

A busboy delivered the traditional block of Swiss cheese and a small loaf of bread. The block of cheese was smallish, but that was sometimes the case even back in my day, and considering their diminishing food supply, I actually expected worse. What was more interesting was the fact that the block didn’t come on a cutting board, but sat directly on part of the thick red wax covering that hadn’t been cut away from the cheese. Swiss cheese doesn’t have a rind and therefore, isn’t generally packaged in a wax covering, but rather vacuum sealed in plastic. Specifically, the Swiss cheese that we served in the past came in huge blocks (100 lbs.?), vacuum sealed in plastic, that we then cut down to six blocks (almost a foot on each side) to serve to customers. So, it appeared that we were being served a different cheese, or at least a cheese from a different supplier. I piled paper-thin slices of the Swiss on my bread plate and was soon relieved to find that it tasted exactly the same as I remembered. It was delicious!

We told the waiter that we would like to place our dinner order quickly in the hopes that we would be able to get what we wanted. He said there shouldn’t be a problem, because they had just closed the restaurant and wouldn’t have any more customers that night. It wasn’t even 9 o’clock. They would normally be open until 11pm. In fact, by the time the 9 o’clock swing finished, there were maybe only four other tables in the restaurant, so there was really nobody left to deplete any more food. Sure enough, everything that we wanted to order was available.

Our house salads arrived. The chilled fork presentation was a nice new touch, but the salads were smaller than the hearty servings I used to prepare and the house dressing, a creamy Italian with grated Swiss cheese, was quite a disappointment. In the past, finely grated Swiss cheese was mixed into the dressing, properly infusing the dressing with the Swiss flavor. This appeared to be regular creamy Italian dressing poured over Swiss cheese that had been coarsely grated over the salad. Worse, the dressing itself was not very good and overall the salad was a watery, goopy mess.

The poor salad was immediately forgotten, as soon as our steaks arrived. Except for being plated with the fat side out towards the customer (a presentation no-no), my 16 oz. prime rib was perfect. It was big, bloody, and beautiful. In the 20+ years since I have worked at the OSF, I have found myself constantly disappointed when ordering prime rib (always rare to medium-rare) from other restaurants and having a grilled steak served to me. This is an excerpt from a wonderfully impassioned letter written by Mick Vann, contributor to the Food section of the Austin Chronicle. His description of how prime rib should be cooked is exactly how OSF did it. His disappointment in how “prime rib” is now cooked and served is exactly what I have found, as well:

Our prime rib was cooked low and slow in an Alto-Shaam oven cabinet, so that it was cooked overall to rare in the center of the roll. We used a 109A prime rib rack, bone-in. If we had an order for MW or Well, we gently braised it in a pan of au jus, or brought it up on the grill (called a “Douglas Cut”), using the end cuts of the roasted roll. There was a nice layer of browned goodness on the exterior. Now what steak places use is a rib eye roll that they just put in the oven … no bone, no browned exterior, and it’s NOT Prime! What they are serving is a rib eye roast, and calling it Prime rib. One we tasted was obviously removed from a Cryovac bag, and was precooked! Restaurateurs who do that should be ashamed of serving inferior cuts to their unsuspecting customers!

The steak was served with a baked potato, a ramekin each of au jus and horseradish sauce, and two sprigs of broccoli that were really more of a Texas-sized garnish than a side of veggies. I noted that the potato was no longer rosin baked, which was a method of cooking the potatos by dunking them in a boiling vat of rosin, a thick, syrupy substance made from pine sap. The potatos would be pulled from the vat, immediately wrapped in brown paper and served. The idea was that this method of cooking prevented the moisture loss from oven baking. I have also heard it said that the process imparts a unique flavor to the potato, though I have never thought so. While it was sad to see another unique aspect of the OSF gone, the truth is that I never preferred potatos cooked that way because the process rendered the potato skin inedible. My baked potato was good, but the waiter didn’t mix the butter and sour cream into it enough and it all melted out onto my plate in a buttery, goopy mess.

But I couldn’t be bothered with the state of my salad or baked potato. I was there for the memories and for the steak. My prime rib was all that I had dreamt it would be. It was tender, juicy, and delicious. Mrs. Pribble agreed that her prime rib was good as well and also gave high marks to the garlic mashed potatos. This is what Mat had to say about his meal:

I had the rib eye, “the most flavorable of all steaks!” according to the menu (“flavorable”? Perhaps they meant “flavorful”). It was a bit disappointing; the meat was a poor cut, somewhat gristle-y, but I can forgive that as they were probably having to dredge the dumpster for post-expiration date meat at that point. Less forgivable was the cooking; it was much more medium-well than medium (almost no pink at all). But it could certainly have had more flavor added to it, so I suppose it met the advertised promise of being “flavorable”. Oh, and the garlic mashed potatoes and broccoli were fine.

I’m sorry that Mat didn’t enjoy his meal as much as Mrs. Pribble or myself, but he didn’t make a fuss. This was probably because there wasn’t time to complain between the recounting of story after story of our time working at OSF. Some were well worn and often told stories, but some were new remberances helped along by just being there. Pam, the other employee who had been there since the beginning, also helped out by sharing with us her memories, starting with our drinks. Mat and I knew that we wanted a souvenir glass to take away with us. In our day, to get a souvenir glass, you had to order the house special, which was some flaming frou-frou drink. The menu now showed a dozen different drinks that qualified for the souvenir glass, but none of them sounded like the old special and none of them seemed to involve fire. I caught-up with Pam at the bar and she reminded me that the drink was called “The Swinger” (duh, Jimmy) and though it was no longer on the menu, they could whip up a couple, no problem. No longer on the menu? How could that be? When the waiter arrived with the drinks, he offered a clue while lighting the drinks, “Now I have been told that if you let these burn too long, the glass could shatter.” So that was it. Like the seatbelt on the swing, the end of rosin baked potatos (later confirmed to be at the hand of the fire marshal), and the removal of the house specialty drink from the menu, OSF had eroded the essence of their unique personality, of their very character, just to keep glasses of flaming alcohol from exploding in a few faces. That’s just sad.

Jimmy and Mat risk life and limb for their OSF souvenir glasses.

Speaking of sad, by the 10 o’clock swing, there were maybe three tables, including ours. I took photos of the last swing performance in Austin and we did our best to cheer her on. Part of me wished that the restaurant would have been packed to the rafters for its last Saturday night. I mean, I had seen Saturday nights with 800-900 covers! I had seen the lobby and bar packed for hours with people waiting for a table. I had seen the valets double-park the whole lot and then park cars down the street. But those days were long, long ago and instead, it all ended quietly. Bernice, Pam and a few of the other employees got up on the bar for group photos. One of the swingers asked me to photograph her on the swing.

We realized that the piano player was also the flambé cook, so we rushed to order our dessert before he was cut loose. Tableside flambé service had long ago been done away with (again, in the interest of safety) and a permanent flambé station had been built. I was told they didn’t have the Cherries Jubilee, so Mrs. Pribble and I shared an order of Strawberries Flambé and Mat ordered the Bananas Foster. One of the downsides of having these desserts prepared away from the table is that they can still only be prepared one at a time, yet the waiter is likely to want to serve the whole table at once. So, our Strawberries Flambé was cooked first and by the time it got to us, it had mostly melted into a creamy, goopy mess. Sigh. Still, it was tasty. Mat, who had chatted it up with the piano player while the flambés were being cooked, shared with me the recipe changes that had occurred since when we had learned to flambé. I can’t say that I agreed with any of them. Since when does orange liqueur take the place of fresh juice squeezed from an orange?

After dessert, I had a chance to visit and reminisce with Bernice and Pam. The names and memories poured out of us: Bob Van Hattum, Tim, Les, Clint (the Vans-wearing bartender who went off to stunt man school in Hollywood and was killed in an airplane accident), Larry the mumbler, Irene and her sister, Becky and her sister, big Becky (Ford EXP), Rebecca (Boo) and Quita, Lynn, Blue, Simon and Jeff (the stoner busboy), Jeff Rasmussen, Jeff Holden, Lori (Planet X), Laurie, Brenda and Tony, Cathi Ball, Judith, Misty, the expo guy on speed, Carlos, the white busboys, the breakdancing busboys, the Mexican busboys, Edwardo, Ed Mancuso, the Anderson twins, John Anderson, and my close friends - Mat Farabee, Charles Braden, Wes Mau, and Rob Booth. These names were still only scratching the surface. Besides, every name unpacks even more memories of not only things we did at the steak house, but things we did outside the steak house as well. Somehow, I feel like I packed a lifetime of memories into barely four years. I’ll have to talk more about those some other time.

Bernice and Pam also knew where a lot of people were and how they were doing. They said a lot of folks had come back when they heard the OSF was going to close. A lot of swingers came back to swing one last time. That was comforting to hear. Even better was hearing about all of the couples who met at the OSF and were still together: Jim and Cheri, Kevin and Sherri, Rob and Michelle, and several others. Somehow, between all the sex, drugs, and rock & roll (and there was a lot of that), there was true, lasting romance to be found there. Pam said the best thing to me, though. After we had talked for a long time, she said, “I have been here all along, so I can tell you that you’re not mistaken - those were the good old days. It has never been better.”

We had been the only table for a couple of hours. It was almost one o’clock in the morning. The piano player was gone and canned music played through the PA. Our waiter had long since gone home, but Pam kept our water glasses full and they left the lights down for us. Usually, they gave customers a brand new souvenir glass, but they had run out and so our actual glasses were boxed up, sugar still on the rims. Pam offered us a beautiful chocolate cake, but we were full. Then she gave us copies of a book, The Legend of Gussie Lee, which had been published in 2000. The few staff remaining were quietly closing out tickets and counting their cash. I felt myself unwilling to stand up from the table. I was looking for any way to stall. But finally, there was nothing else and with a deep sigh, I stood. My wife wanted me to blow out the candle on the table, but it was too Tennessee Williams for me and I would have none of it. I hugged Pam one last time and we walked out under the Hurry Slowly sign over the front door. The doors creaked, first the inner, then the outer.

jimmy 

This begins as a story about a story. As I have contemplated what to blog about over the next couple of weeks, I considered writing a review of the Old Hickory Steakhouse, located in the Gaylord Texan Resort, in Grapevine, Texas. I ate there a couple of weeks ago, while working at my employer’s annual convention. I had there what might have been the best steak of my life. It was easily the most expensive. I ordered the special, which was a bone-in filet not on the menu. I assumed the price would fall in line with the other steaks, which range from $30-$43. They delivered a beautiful steak, cooked rare to just barely medium rare, exactly as I had asked. As is my usual way, I cut the thick steak into strips as thin as possible and lingered over every bite. It was delightful. When I was about halfway through, my friend Peyton leaned across the table and asked if I knew how much my steak cost. I didn’t. “It’s $65, just for the steak,” she said. Ouch! That’s quite a different world for a guy who reviews NightHawk frozen steak dinners on his blog. All told, a dozen of us racked-up a $1400 bill. It was excessive. It was exquisite. It was…expensed! Whew.

Since I was considering writing a review of a steak house, the next step was to go to my clip files and see how a good steak house review is written. I found a review of L.A. steak houses, written by Alan Richman for the March 2003 issue of GQ magazine. Great article, which I re-read over the last couple of nights before I went to bed. Then today, while I was at work, I began to outline the review in my head. I decided there would be no way that I could write a steak house review for my blog, without spending some time with an important detail of my background. My first job, from 1984-1986 (and again very briefly in 1988), was at the Old San Francisco Steak House, here in Austin. It’s an important time and place in my life, which deserves a thorough examination in a later blog entry. Among other things, it was where I met two of my closest friends, Charles Braden and Rob Booth. One of my other best friends, Mat Farabee, got me my job there, when I was 15.

Anyway, as I was thinking about the OSF (as we called it), I wondered how it was doing. I last ate there seven years ago with my groomsmen and friends, before my bachelor party. Even then it seemed different than how I had known it. It seemed to be catering to a different crowd and it felt a little lost. In all of my years of dining out with family and friends, I have never once heard anyone ever suggest eating at OSF. It’s not, nor ever has been on the radar. It has always been in a terrible location, which is only getting worse. So, how could it be surviving? Certainly its days are numbered. Those thoughts were running through my head today. This evening, my mother called and said that she had gone to the OSF just last night (a decent enough coincidence by itself) and found out that Sunday is to be its last day open. They are closing!

Though Mrs. Pribble and I are well over our dining budget for the year, I think I would regret not eating at the OSF one last time. We plan to have dinner there tomorrow night and I’ll have a full report soon.

The Workout: 30 minutes on the home treadmill.

jimmy 

Recently, my friend Rob brought-up the subject of Night Hawk dinners on his blog. Matt weighed-in with his review and the whole subject has sparked some nostalgic interest in me. For those that don’t know, Night Hawk was a steak house chain in Austin, Texas from 1939 through 1994. However, I never ate a meal at one of those retaurants. Instead, I ate Night Hawk TV dinners, which are still available today. I must have eaten 1000 of them. I just confirmed with my mother that we would bring them home ten at a time from the grocery store. My father specifically requested them because he thought that even though they cost a little more than their competitors, they tasted better and were worth the extra expense. He liked the Night Hawk Taste of Texas, which was the standard Night Hawk charbroiled chopped beef patty, with ranch style beans and cornbread. My brother and I didn’t like the cornbread, so we chose from our deep freezer full of Steak ‘n Corn and Steak ‘n Taters, which according to the Night Hawk website, is one of the company’s signature items. So, after not having eaten one of these dinners in close to 20 years, I decided to pick up a Steak ‘n Taters to see if it was as I remembered it.

Night Hawk dinners are widely available here in Central Texas, so there was no problem finding one at a local HEB grocery store. I didn’t think to note the exact price (though it was under $2), nor did I think to compare the price to similar dinners of other brands. Since the sales volume of Night Hawk is much smaller than say a Swanson, I expect the price would be a little higher.

The box has changed over the years, but it is very similar to the way I remember it. The overall design and color scheme, which is handsome and does a good job of invoking a steak house feel, has stayed consistent, which I appreciate. The most obvious change in the design is the Night Hawk logo. Along with the words Night Hawk, there is a flame graphic all over the packaging. Conspicuously absent is the great old Night Hawk logo of…a night hawk! Did the mascot retire? Was there a bitter lawsuit? Did some young, overpriced consultant convince them that the mascot should be thrown into the fire, so to speak? I don’t know, but it’s wrong. Bring back the Hawk! The only other thing that I really notice about the box is that the photo of the dinner used to completely fit on the front, but has grown to be optimistically large (more on that later). The photo also shows a “side salad” of lettuce and tomatos. Fine print tells us that this is a suggested serving. I agree that a side salad probably would be a good thing to serve with this dinner, but taken at its true scale, the photo shows a salad of a pickle-slice sized piece of lettuce and half of a cherry tomato. I think the old box just had a sprig of parsely and was perhaps more honest.

I opened the box and discovered some other changes since I had last had one of these. The old meals came in an aluminum tray covered with a thin piece of waxed cardboard, which was removed before cooking. The new meal comes in a plastic tray, covered with a clear piece of thin plastic film, which is cut before cooking. This new packaging allows the meal to be cooked in a microwave. An even bigger difference is the steak sauce, which now comes in a small condiment packet. The steak sauce used to already be on the steak. In fact, I would scrape any frozen steak sauce which had stuck to the back of the cardboard cover, back onto the steak. Like the suggested side salad, the optional steak sauce is a nod towards healthy eating and I think it was the right thing to do (though really, if you have any kind of dietary restrictions or concerns, you shouldn’t even be looking at one of these things).

I cooked the dinner in the oven, according to the instructions. Now, I would swear that I remembered that the old instructions gave different times for the desired wellness of the meat, but I admit that this could be a false memory. What is not a false memory is that I used to eat these steaks pink in the middle, or medium-rare. So, I pulled this steak out early, hoping for medium-rare, but the steak was still cold. I put it back in for just a couple of more minutes and everything came out hot enough to eat. However, the steak was cooked all the way through. No pink at all. In other words, the steak comes pre-cooked to medium. This wasn’t really that much of a surprise - such are the wimpy times in which we live. I recognize that this is chopped beef and any kind of chopped beef should be cooked more thoroughly than a cut steak, but I’m only asking for things to be the way they were.

I wouldn’t normally plate a TV dinner, but it is more difficult to cut a steak in a tray and besides, the cover photo shows the dinner on a platter (suggested serving). A normal-sized plate really shows off how diminutive this meal really is. Undeterred, I poured the entire contents of the steak sauce packet onto the steak. Yes, it’s true that the sauce is mostly margarine, but for the record, it also contains: salt, mustard powder, lemon juice powder, and garlic powder. It isn’t very good steak sauce, but some people like butter on their steaks, and I used the sauce because that is always how I had my Night Hawk steaks.

The verdict? Except for being over-cooked from the factory, it was exactly as I remembered it, which is to say - pretty good. The steak’s flavor is mostly drowned-out by the sauce, but the charbroiled flavor does come through and matched with a proper steak sauce (or with good dry seasonings), this would be a fine chopped steak. Better still are the tator tots, which could hold their own against any tot in the biz. They have a perfectly-cooked, crispy outside and good potato flavor inside, with just a hint of a meat note from being packaged with the steak. Good God, did I just say meat note? Anyway, after so many years, I was pleased that Night Hawk has mostly stuck to their guns and delivered the same locally-produced, quality experience that I remember from my youth. I could make a better chopped steak of course, but if Night Hawk sold bags of tots, I would buy them. First rate.

Since part of this excercise is about contemplating what I used to eat vs. what I currently eat, I decided to grab a TV dinner from my current stock and compare the two. So, I selected a Lean Cuisine Beef Peppercorn, which is peppercorn sauce over beef steak tips, with green beans, red peppers, and skin potatos. In other words, steak ‘n taters. Now originally, I was going to have a little fun by comparing the nutritional values of these two meals, but that isn’t what ended-up interesting me. The Lean Cuisine, despite my preconceived notions of their portion-control sizes, and despite being packaged in a smaller box, actually contains more food than the Night Hawk steak dinner! The Night Hawk Steak ‘n Taters dinner is 172g, while the Lean Cuisine is a whopping 248g! That’s almost 32% more food and it’s not even a Lean Cuisine “dinner portion” meal. In a market where Swanson boasts of having Hungry-Man dinners with a pound of food, this is interesting.

It was fun revisiting the Night Hawk dinner, so I plan on continuing with a series of articles soon exploring other foods that time forgot…I mean, that I used to eat.

Update 07.26.05: I corrected my article, because I kept saying Swanson’s instead of Swanson. Also, on July 20, amidst this burst of discussion about the TV dinner with my friends and presumably unbeknownst to us, Gerry Thomas, father of the TV dinner, died at the age of 83.