Lick Is King

Sometime over the last few years, someone doused the smoldering Austin food scene with gasoline. One after another, new places opened that set a new standard for long-stagnant categories. BBQ got upended by Franklin. Sweets got a new queen in Sugar Mamas. Uchi  lapped every other Sushi joint in the state. Medici made us forget that anyone else ever poured a latte. And now: Ice Cream. Lick simply eclipses anything else you can get in a cone.

I know this will rankle. I know that there are ice cream loyalties in this town that run deep. Please don't egg my car. I'm just calling it like I see it.

Lick is nestled in a compact storefront right next to Henri's and Barley Swine. This is a legit parking lot. A few benches out front and a couple of stools in a corner inside are the extent of the formal seating, but people make do - backs against posts, sitting on curbs, leaning on their single-speed bikes. Inside, the tiny space is pretty, but sparse, dominated by about 15 feet of ice cream under glass and a monumental, bright red, um, tongue, I think. Flavors are listed on large-size note cards tacked up on the bulletin board.

And that's where things get interesting. Grapefruit Ginger. Hill Country Honey Vanilla Bean. Strawberry Basil. Cilantro Lime. Beets and Mint. Salted Caramel. It's not Iron-Chef-Octopus-Eyeball-Ice-Cream-Weird, but it's also not a menu board you're going to mistake for Baskin Robbins. Dealing with savory elements is a tricky business, and Lick manages it beautifully, nearly all the time. The Grapefruit Ginger is pure summer - juicy, with a little pucker of sour flavor hidden inside folds of cream and sweet. The caramel and chocolate are the most intense of either flavor I've ever tasted in an ice cream. Chocolate ice cream usually comes with a chalky, powdery edge - I avoid it whenever possible. But here, the chocolate tastes like a cold, creamy ganache - elegant and pristine.

It's brilliant, but it's not perfect. There are creamier ice creams, and the scoops set about melting more quickly than others. Occasionally, as the flavors of the generally-local ingredients shift, the flavors in the ice creams shift as well. I've had strawberry basil so good it made my toes curl, and I've had the same ice cream where the basil was too forward, leaving the strawberry as an afterthought. It's the reality of pushing limits though, and the reality of working with powerful, flavorful, real, ingredients. A little inconsistency is OK by me.

Lick is the Franklin, the Sugar Mamas, the Uchi, the Medici of Ice Cream. It changes the dessert landscape in this town. Thanks for showing up, Lick, we've been waiting for you.

Simple Pleasures: Blue Dahlia

Blue Dahlia exudes charm, from the battered wooden sign on the sidewalk out front to the enclosed arbor patio at the back. An early entrant into the East 6th renaissance, Blue Dahlia has built a compelling mix of simple, French-inspired dishes, heavily reliant on seasonal local produce. A second location is set to launch in Westlake on June 8, 2012 (just a few days from now) and I think the approach that keeps it so packed on the East Side will work well on the West Side, too.

The small indoor space is dominated by two massive community tables made from giant polished slabs of warm, gnarled wood. Smaller tables are fit close together, and a long counter supports shelves covered in loaves of fresh bread. It's a tight squeeze, but thanks to the focused, attentive, and generally fabulous staff it never feels chaotic; more well-managed bustle.

The menu is varied, with a handful items loosely bucketed into breakfast items, beautiful open faced sandwiches, salads, and a sweet selection of inexpensive dinner entrees.

Everything's good, but the basic rule for me so far: the less ambitious the dish, the more fantastic it is. It's not that these folks don't turn out pretty impressive stuff - it's just that the most inspired flavor comes from the core elements they work with. As an example - the tomato gazpacho, basically a coursely chopped mix of a Johnson's Backyard Garden basket is far more impressive than the cream-based white gazpacho, a more finessed mix of cream and cucumbers that doesn't really come together.

Likewise for the entrees - where Blue Dahlia lets the vegetables speak for themselves, it's a thing of beauty - the ratatouille is tangy and deeply satisfying, but the bed of Israeli cous cous and mixed greens, and the shaved Parmesan on top felt like afterthoughts. In the case of the greens, a pretty distant afterthought - lovely little sprigs of baby romaine wilted into squish against the heat of the vegetables. I would have been happier eating that ratutouille in a simple bowl with a chunk of crusty french bread to mop up the amazing flavor.

The tartines I've tried have been more consistent - goat cheese and tapenande is simple and on point, served on a rustic slate board on slightly spongy, wonderfully dense whole wheat bread with a bright shock of roasted red pepper. The combination of astringent and creamy in that sandwich is brilliant, as it is in the savory chicken salad.

Blue Dahlia is many things. It is beautiful. It is welcoming. It is phenomenally well staffed. Food here is made with love, and made with some of the best ingredients I've seen in a town stuffed with farm-to-market eateries. But for all that I love about Blue Dahlia, it's not a place where food is deeply transformed - there's nothing fussy, nothing genius about it. It's a place to go to enjoy a glass of wine and a slate of artisanal cheese, on a patio that is bearable even in the heat, exactly the breezy neighborhood restaurant you wish would open up down the street from you.

A Houndstooth Cupping

A month or so ago, out of the blue, I got an email from Jodi Bart asking if I wanted to partner up with Houndstooth to host a coffee cupping for Austin Food Blogger Alliance members. It was difficult to respond with appropriate decorum. Did I want to take Cindy Crawford to my middle school prom? HELL YES I WANT TO PARTNER UP WITH HOUNDSTOOTH FOR A CUPPING EVENT.

So I did. And it was unreasonably, awesomely, fantastically, fun.

Sunday night at 6:00, about 20 of us filtered in and took seats around the shop, scanning the room, trying to connect actual faces to twitter profile pics and profile pics to blogs. On the counter, there were apples; as Sean's brother Paul ground coffee for the cupping, we tasted them. At first, they tasted like... apples. And when we tried to describe the tastes to each other, a lot of us found ourselves coming up blank, going back for second tries. Soon, we started to isolate textures, and sweetness, and citrus flavors, and the bitterness of peel. And then we were ready.

The first step in the cupping is fragrance. This is the part where you stick your nose into a juice glass with a couple of tablespoons of fresh ground coffee at the bottom and inhale. It was a little embarrassing to be in public with one's nose quite so deep in a glass, but it was all so intoxicating that I stopped caring by the time I got to the Burundi. There were blueberry and cherry scents, notes of balsa wood, pepper, chili, almonds. And the fragrance shifted, as the coffee sat, even over a few minutes.



We compared notes, and then shifted from fragrance, when the beans were dry, to the more difficult task of aroma, which is what a coffee smells like when it's wet. It's much harder to get a sense for the aromas here, so there's a whole process of "breaking the crust" when going in for the aroma notes, involving a back and forth and book swish of a spoon after the hot water was poured over the grounds. Sean sort of nailed it on this one when he said mostly it'll just smell hot.

At this point, we were all revved up and ready to get tasting, and Sean gave us a good demo there too. To taste, you slurp. Full on, snooty wine style, slurp. It makes a floppy wet sound sound, kind of like an air zerbert. I no longer felt like the fragrance was the embarrassing part of the event. But the reward for the slurp was the tastes that came flooding in from these coffees. The Mad Cap Gishamwana Rwanda started with flash of sharp almost lemon flavor and the sunk into a silky resonating chocolate. The Gatare Burundi, from Handsome in LA, had a smoother flavor, woody and full bodied, without more subtle changes from start to middle to end. We got almonds from the Finca Nueva Armenia Guatemala, butter from the El Gavilan Ecuador, and a big fat blueberry pie from the Peru all from Counter Culture. Standing around each coffee in little clusters, we'd slurp and compare notes - someone said wood, and someone else said wet wood, and someone else connected that with popsicle stick, and as subjective as this process is, a description resonated, and we could all taste it.

Popular vote was a close run between the Burundi and the Rawanda, but the Rawanda eeked out the victory (sorry Maggie), and Paul set about brewing us all cups of it using a few of the shop's Clevers. We sipped, and sighed, and caught up with each other a bit before packing up our cameras and note pads and heading back out into the warm night and home.

We are novices - most of us anyway - and we have a lot more to learn. We focused on 3 of the dimensions in a real cupping - fragrance, aroma, and flavor. There's acidity to consider next time, and body, aftertaste, and balance. And the entire SCAA flavor wheel to master. So thank you once again Sean and Houndstooth for having us, and Jodi, who I think is now officially my coffee addiction enabler. Can't wait until next time.

Looking for more cupping action? Mike Galante and Farmstress Maggie, a couple of my AFBA compatriots already have posts on the event up as well:
http://blog.mikegalante.com/2012/houndstooth-hosts-the-afba/
http://frommaggiesfarm.blogspot.com/2012/05/coffee-cupping-at-houndstooth-austin.html