Round two of Austin’s second Restaurant Week is NOW, March 8-11, so try a restaurant on the cheap with prix-fixe $25 or $35 menus.
My G and I tried Jeffrey’s last week and were pretty happy. I went with beet salad, gnocchi (pictured), and chocolate cake.
He went crispy oysters, ribs (pictured), and crepes.
Luckily, the Statesman’s foodie Mike Sutter got the three things we didn’t (3 courses, 3 options in each) and wrote about it here:
Jeffrey’s
1204 West Lynn St. 477-5584, www.jeffreysofaustin.com.
• My Austin Restaurant Week dinner ($35): Crispy veal bone marrow with housemade pickles, milk-poached halibut cheeks with pea-shoot salad, inverted Coke float with pineapple fries. Other options include crispy oysters, sous vide short ribs, seared gnocchi and Meyer lemon crepe dumplings.
Adding to the subversive allure of a $35 tasting at Jeffrey’s is the spectator sport of catching the new guy in action. Chef Deegan McClung took over for Alma Alcocer-Thomas in February, and his Austin Restaurant Week menu showcases bold strokes for which owner Ron Weiss had to buy new kitchen technology: sous vide short ribs that emerge medium-rare even after 36 hours of simmering with their marinade in a sealed bag and a delicate, vacuum-poached fish. Beyond the flash of the new, Jeffrey’s is still an elegant escape, with a marvel of a 12-page wine list that includes clever nods to value, flatware so balanced the knives can stand on edge and bright paintings offering colorful vistas along dark-toned walls. Waiters work the tandem magic of invisibility and presence.
But it’s the newness that’s filling seats, along with the $35 price point. A starter taste of deep-fried carrot-ginger soup yielded to an assembly line of rich bone-marrow bites, tart salsa verde and pickled tomato, onion and baby cucumber on toast. For the main course, I had to try the halibut cheeks (who knew fish had cheeks?). The small, smooth-muscled ovals from just below the eyes are something of a delicacy, I’m told, and they were treated with simple respect: a pear-and-fennel emulsion and sweet peas with a pea-shoot salad. Pastry chef Courtney McBroom’s inverted Coke float with pineapple fries sounded too cute to be true, but it was a David Lynch-movie malt-shop of a marvel: icy Coke sorbet in sweet vanilla crème anglaise, with a side of fried pineapple sticks and three dipping sauces – coconut-curry, cherry-wasabi and boozy buttered rum – arm-wrestling each other for “favorite” status.
Weiss said response to the Austin Restaurant Week menu has been so strong that Jeffrey’s will put a Sunday-through-Wednesday $40 fixed-price menu into service starting March 15. Meanwhile, you’ve got this Sunday through Wednesday to catch the discount show.
I think we missed out on the Coke Float! While we had an excellent dinner, we couldn’t help but compare it to Olivia, the site of our last big dinner out, and both of us preferred her. The food at Olivia was tastier, the portions bigger, and the last time I asked Jeffrey’s, they didn’t serve free-range beef. While my foodie friend Beth at Texas Locavore found out through some investigative reporting that Olivia’s beef isn’t always local and free range, at least it sometimes is.
Anyway, try a new restaurant out this week! List is here. Matt Swinney, publisher of Rare Magazine and kickstarter of Austin Restaurant Week says of the past week:
- During Austin Restaurant Week, almost every restaurant has seen somewhere between 25% – 50% increases in business over the same days a year ago