Greening Austin Daily

Restaurant Review: Barley Swine

13th January, 2012 - Posted by katherine - No Comments

On Monday I stopped by Barley Swine with Carsi after work for dinner.   Located at 2024 S. Lamar, Barley Swine is owned by the same person who owns the Odd Duck trailer also on South Lamar.  (Right now the Odd Duck trailer is closed and may or may not re-open in the Spring.  I really really hope it reopens! Read more about that here.)  While it was open, I had stopped by the Odd Duck trailer for dinner at least 5 times, and LOVED it, so I was excited to try Barley Swine.

Barley Swine was similar to Odd Duck’s food offerings in many ways.  As with the Odd Duck, local ingredients are the focus, and plates are rather small – you’re encouraged to get 2-3 plates per person in order to be full at the end of a meal.  An obvious dissimilarity between the two though is that Barley Swine is a sit-down restaurant, while Odd Duck was a trailer with cute outdoor seating and BOB.  Barley Swine was cozy inside and a nice low-key place to go with friends.  You’re seated at cocktail tables or long 6 person tables, so if you go with a date you may end up sitting at a 6 person table next to a stranger, but that makes it easier to see what other people in the restaurant are ordering.

We each had a beer, and I don’t know much about beer but whatever I had was from Austin and came in a cute glass. The waitress was extremely knowledgeable about beers, and very friendly and prompt overall.

For dinner, I had a shrimp dish that, unfortunately isn’t on the on-line menu now and I can’t remember what all was in it.  It was very fancy but, as I expected, was rather small.  I think it was about $10. Here’s a poor quality picture:

I also had the spiced goat cake, which came with some delicious cauliflower, for $12.  The goat cake was interesting and this plate was more substantial.  Here a picture of that dish (in the background are Carsi’s chickpea fritters):

Since Carsi’s a vegetarian and I wanted to try the max number of plates (I knew she would share with me) I ordered non-vegetarian plates although normally I would be drawn to the vegetarian dishes here.  Carsi’s fritters were tasty but I wasn’t blown away. They cost $8.  She also had the beet salad, which although this is a bad picture of it, was the best of the four dishes in my opinion:

This dish had tasty little roasted beets, fresh cheese curds, salted pistachio, grilled fennel, and some greens that I think had been baked because they were very crisp and delicious.  It was a really nice flavor combination and was worth the $8.

I appreciate that Barley Swine uses local ingredients, and I appreciate that they serve unique and interesting dishes, so I will probably go back there with my husband sometime soon.  It’s just that after being spoiled by the Odd Duck trailer, which had pretty similar-type dishes but at a noticeably lower price (and the lower price makes sense as a trailer isn’t going to have the same type of over-head costs as a sit-down restaurant), it seemed slightly over-priced.  But everything we had was good and it was fun to try something new and know we were eating local food.  For a special night out, give it a try!