Places we LOVED to eat ... Part 2
Posted Friday, September 27, 2013 11:13 AM

The Bun ‘n Barrel on Austin Highway.  Doesn’t this place predate most of us?  One of the few remnants of our Austin Highway world.  Rather shabby with only outside picnic tables, but could they do the barbecue!  It wouldn’t have mattered if they had sold it out of cardboard boxes and we had to sit on the asphalt.  We would have flocked there.  We always bought the sliced brisket, wrapped up in pink butcher paper, and potato salad and beans in paper cartons.  They smoked the meat right there on site to lure us in.  You could smell it for hundreds of yards.

Jim’s Frontier Drive in on Austin Highway, down by the old drive-in theatre.  Not to be confused with Jim’s Coffee shops, which were owned by the same company.  The drive-in just did better burgers.  My eyes still glaze over and I drool when I think about those things.  Probably the simplest hamburger I ever ate:  just the patty, grilled bun and maybe some mustard.  But that flavor …. I have never tasted and will probably never taste hamburger meat that tasted that good.  It was charcoal broiled and came wrapped in little foil envelopes.  The smoked flavor carried it.  You didn’t need to add anything.  Nothing like the goopy drippy stuff we get at Burger Kind or MacDonalds.  They also served an awesome limeade, freshly squeezed.  There may have been fries available.  We certainly didn’t order them.  There was no need.

Earl Abel’s must be mentioned, though my family only ate there once.  I know it was a Sunday destination for many families, and I think they had pretty good fried chicken.  I think it was also a big date and prom restaurant.  I have no idea why we hardly went there.  Maybe it was too “Alamo Heights” for us.  Mark Beaulieu immortalized the art-deco style building in one of his air brush paintings.  You can see it on his website.

The Little Red Barn Steak House on Hackberry.  This was where I had my first loaded baked potato.  Now my mother had been serving us baked potatoes for years, but these were but a pale imitation of what I was about to encounter.  I never really knew what a baked potato could be until it was Vicki Brown’s birthday, and her mother included me in the family celebration at the Little Red Barn.  They brought out the steaming potatoes which were about half the size of footballs.  Did they grow them using steroids?   Then they offered us all the toppings.  Heck, I thought you just put butter on the things.  That’s what we did at home.  I had no idea there were so many other choices.   It was amazing watching the waiter stand there at your table and work in about half a cup of butter, grated cheese, green onions, bacon and then the crowning glory:  that huge dollop of sour cream.  I stuck my fork in and entered Paradise.  Who cared about the steak after that?  I was never much of steak person anyway.  We ate like hogs, probably consuming close to 3000 calories, most of it fat.  No wonder Americans overeat when we are offered choices like that.

Luby’s was a regular destination for us.  We considered Luby’s to be a high class joint.  Apparently a lot of other people did too because there was ALWAYS a line.  Always.    My husband even got dragged there as a child by his San Antonio based aunt and uncle when he was up visiting from Mexico.   We joke around that we were probably there as children at the same time at least once.  He didn’t care for Luby’s!  He preferred his street tacos from home.   But I loved their cole slaw, mashed potatoes with brown gravy, and fried fish.  I often included a square of red jello or pumpkin pie with my meal.  I never ate the pie crust, just wanted to scrape out and eat the pumpkin filling.  I always got my nose out of joint when the cashier would hit that bell and some strange woman in a stupid hat and starched apron would appear and grab my tray and carry it to the table.  But the food always tasted good, basic, but good.  We most often ate at the Broadway location (next to the Broadway Theatre and across from that toad stool bus stop), but sometimes got adventurous and went out to the North Star Mall with its veranda.  You always had to wait at least 20-30 minutes in line, but at the mall, you could ogle the food and decide on your selections as you went down in one direction, and then doubled back to actually fill up your tray.

It is hard to believe in the late 60s that there really weren’t pizza joints all over the place where you could get take-out whenever you pleased.  How did we do it?  I was in 9th grade, I believe, before I tasted my first take-out pizza, and my brother would drive all the way to Fredericksburg road to a Pizza Inn to buy it.  It was that far away!  By the time he got it home, it had lost most of its heat, but who cared?  It still tasted awesome.   Gas was still cheap back then, so it was no big deal to drive 10 miles going and coming around Loop 410 for some pizza.

An amusing aside:  a few years later, my brother worked in a lot of pizza joints, which by then had sprung up all over the place.  Naturally, they ate pizza daily on the job, since it was free.  One evening he and the other crew were pretty sick of eating pizza and cast their eyes across the street at a Mexican restaurant.  They decided to give them a call.  Are you as sick of eating Mexican food as we are of pizza? They sure were.  So, each crew prepared a feast and they met and exchanged it in the middle of the parking lot.  The pizza guys got stuffed with Mexican food, and the Mexican food guys got stuffed on pizza.  A goodly exchange!