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!

After our wait for a table, things went pretty smoothly with the wait staff, which was impressive considering how recently the cafe opened. Ushered to our table, I had the weird feeling I was in the old building that Bouldin Creek Coffee house used to be in.  Turns out I was right, although they’ve spruced the place up so much that the formerly quaint/dilapidated coffee house  was hardly recognizable at  all.  They’ve really decorated it well and I would go back just because it’s so pretty.  But on to the vegetarian food!

As you can see from their menu, there’s some vegetarian choices but not a huge amount —  the French-Vietnamese cuisine is fairly pork focused.  But they did have a few things to choose from, and I picked the #49, roasted mushroom and grilled tofu bun.   At $12 it was a little overpriced, but the veggies in it were extremely fresh, the presentation was done well, and I really enjoyed my meal.   For dessert we had the caramelized banana pots de creme.  At $8 I thought it was also slightly overpriced, but it was really delicious and I would get it again, so maybe the price isn’t that far off.  All in all it was a really great meal and a nice, memorable way to spend the New Year’s holiday with my husband.   Probably not the best place to go when trying to help the environment by eating meat less often (the best of pork smells wafting towards you from every corner), but still some pretty good vegetarian choices.

We started with the fruit and cheese plate, which had some fresh fruit (blueberries, peaches, maybe nectarines) in a thin and tasty basil sauce, served with a couple of fried squash blossoms and some ricotta cheese. It was $8 which I thought was a good price.  This is not a good picture, but the presentation was really well done.

It’s not listed on the online menu now, but I had the priest strangler pasta.  A funny name, but basically “priest strangler” noodles are just a type of pasta, as our waitress explained, which you can read about here.  The pasta tasted homemade, was delightfully chewy in a perfectly cooked way, and had a simple tomato, basil, and truffle oil sauce on it. I LOVE truffle oil and this was hands down one of the best pasta dish I’ve ever eaten.  It was a great vegetarian meal! But $16 seemed a little high.

They also had another vegetarian entree called “summer squash tofu” that I’d like to try next time. Check it out!

The eggplant gratin was some baked eggplant with cheese (well, that part probably wasn’t extremely healthy) and I made the vegetable plate  my main course.  The plate came with fresh, raw okra, string beans, cucumber, green squash, and green bell pepper. It was served with 1 hard-boiled egg, a small egg salad, some anchovy butter, a side of sea salt, and some cilantro lime dressing.  It was very healthy but still managed to be filling since it came with the egg sides, and was a nice, light meal after another long, hot Austin day. The presentation was nice, the price was reasonable ($8), and it wasn’t your run of the mill “healthy” option, which is usually a disappointing salad at many restaurants.  Great work, East Side Cafe!

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.

peppercorn tofu

green onion pie

Very tasty!

They had 4 vegetarian entrees, and of those, I chose “Tenzin’s Famous Aloo Channa” ($14), which was recommended as the best vegetarian dish of those 4.  The menu describes it as a  ”combination of potatoes, garbanzo beans and coconut milk together with a zesty blend of curries” served with couscous and basmati rice. It was very delicious and I had no leftovers.  It reminded me a little of Indian food, maybe because of the coconut milk, but it was less spicy while still having a lot of flavor.

Phara’s had a belly dancer while we were there, so that was fun to watch as we sat outside in their expansive patio area.  Phara’s also is BYOB, which is great, especially with a large group of people.  We had a great experience there and I would highly recommend trying it out for a vegetarian meal, or for your next large get together.

And no restaurant review on this blog is complete without a poor quality phone picture of what I ate, so here it is!  It was really good!

Best Tofu Dish

CoCo’s Cafe

Runners-up
Veggie Heaven, Titaya’s Thai Cuisine
Honorable Mention
The Steeping Room, Uchi, Koriente Restaurant & Tea House   

Best Veggie Burger

P. Terry’s Burger Stand

Runner-up
24 Diner
Honorable Mention
Bartlett’s, Hopdoddy Burger Bar, Hut’s Hamburgers  

Best Vegetarian Dish

Mother’s Cafe & Garden

Runners-up
CoCo’s Cafe, Veggie Heaven
Honorable Mention
Casa de Luz, Counter Culture   

Check out the full list here! 

I felt like there was a lot of attention to detail in this little guy.  The spicy kimchi sauce, the lime wedge, the little sesame seeds sprinkled over it – really tasty! Plus the people working at the truck were very nice and friendly and even though it was fairly busy, we didn’t have to wait more than 7 minutes for our food.  This little taco was $2.50, and I would for sure need at least 2 tacos plus a side dish if this was all my lunch consisted of, but like I said, I ate this in addition to my leftovers and was satisfied with the serving.

If you want to check it out, first look at their website and see where there truck will be – it changes often.  I’ve had many friends check this place out and all have loved it, and I was not disappointed!

*Update: I had to edit this page from when this entry was first posted because I initially got the name of the restaurant wrong. Sorry!