Greening Austin Daily

Restaurant Review Friday: 34th Street Cafe

15th July, 2011 - Posted by katherine - 1 Comment

Two weeks ago I attended a birthday celebration at 34th Street Cafe on a Wednesday night.  Located on West 34th Street near the hospital,  34th Street Cafe is a cool little spot serving local food (* maybe serving local food – I think it’s local but I’m not sure- more on that below).  Wednesday nights they have 1/2 prices bottles of wine, which made it great for a birthday party.  We came with a group of probably 25 people, and for a small restaurant they handled the group very well.  We were there a long time, waiting for our food and then waiting for our checks, but that’s to be expected with that large of a group.  Overall, the service was good and our food was fresh.

However, maybe because I had just returned from a weekend in Portland, where everywhere you go the food is so delicious/innovative/unique for reasonable prices, I thought the prices at 34th Street Cafe were a little high for what we got.

To start, my husband and I shared one of their seasonal salads – it’s not on the menu so I can’t say how much it costs – but it was thinly shaved pieces of watermelon served with some feta cheese and maybe a balsamic sauce.  It was nothing special.  A salad that steps outside of the traditional leaf lettuce is a little hard to find in Austin, so I WANTED to like the salad, and with those ingredients, it could have been  very tasty, but it was just meh.

For dinner I ordered the vegetable plate for $15.  It came with some brown rice that was a little overcooked, some tasty little asparagus spears that had been grilled, some grilled fennel that was a little hard to eat (chewy/fibrous but maybe that’s the nature of fennel?), and some wonderful cooked broccoli in a garlicky butter sauce.  Overall it was good, but not worth $15 – nothing magical enough was going on on my plate to justify the cost.

My husband had the panko crusted chicken picatta served with rice for $17.  It was delicious, but not traditional picatta.  The rice was salty and buttery, like maybe it had been cooked in chicken stock. The chicken had been fried and was very juicy and melt-in-your-mouth, but the plate didn’t have any tart lemony flavor that picatta is expected to have.  It was very good, just again, a little overpriced.

*Now about the local food part – several reviews on Yelp noted that the ingredients used are local, but I’m not seeing that on their website so either they don’t advertise it or don’t make it obvious enough on the website.  I would certainly not mind paying $15 for a veggie plate and $17 for friend chicken if it’s local, and even better if it’s organic, but for run of the mill ingredients, I was a little underwhelmed, as M Kors would say.

Also, speaking of Yelp, many of the reviews on there of 34th Street Cafe are very good, so don’t be dissuaded from trying it out based on my review – like I said, I was just coming off the high of 3 and a half  glorious days of Portland culinary prowess, so maybe I was just imposing higher than normal expectations.