Food-o-File

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Random Food News

Consider the plight of Tarrytown residents. Not only did they recently receive notice their property taxes will skyrocket yet again, but last week they found out their favorite neighborhood Chinese take-out restaurant is moving away. The owners of Formosa (2414 Exposition, 322-0344) had known for a year their lease on the Tarrytown property would not be renewed, forcing them to find a new location. They're leaving Memorial Day weekend and relocating their operation, chef, and menu to a restaurant called Wild Ginger (8108 Mesa Drive, 343-8400) by June 15. Tarrytown's loss will be Northwest Hills' gain. Score another strike for the vegetarian activist owner of the Tarrytown Center. As of now, she's refused to renew Formosa's lease, canceled the lease of The Grocery, which forced it out of business, and responded to Texas French Bread's agreement not to sell turkey sandwiches by moving a CC's Coffee House in next door. TFB left the center in mid-January. Before long, the corner of Windsor and Exposition will have no neighborhood flavor at all…The Television Food Network (TVFN) has really discovered Austin. Last year, production teams from Ready, Set, Cook and Bobby Flay's World of Food came to town to shoot episodes of their programs. More recently, segment producers for the program Food Finds visited Austin and the surrounding Hill Country, filming shows scheduled to air this fall. Criteria for inclusion in the program is small companies with a unique regional food product that's available via mail order because folks who watch the program are often eager to purchase the products they discover on it. One of their Food Finds was the beloved local dessert Marta's Flan. The film crew visited owners Marta and Carlos Guzman making flan in the tiny West Austin commercial kitchen that's housed their business for the past seven years and then shot footage in the spacious new kitchen and warehouse facility they're moving into in early June near South Congress and Ben White. Later that day, the crew caught enthusiastic testimonials about the delicious flan from random customers at Güero's (1412 S. Congress, 447-7688). According to what we hear, the TVFN folks spent some time in Fredericksburg looking for stories and will return to Austin in early summer to shoot a segment about Larry Butler's Smoke Dried Tomatoes at Boggy Creek Farm… The newest national restaurant chain to enter the Austin market is the Midwestern outfit Buca di Beppo (3600 Tudor Blvd., 342-8462). Buca is very definitely a high-concept theme restaurant, as in theme or amusement park. The concept is Fifties Italian supper club with a menu featuring southern Italian immigrant foods in gargantuan family-sized portions. The decor is outrageously kitschy (ask to see the Pope Room) with family pictures, Italian travel posters, religious medals, bowling trophies, autographed glossies of Italian and Italian-American movie stars, and Chianti bottles covering every inch of available wall and ceiling space. Entrance to many of the small dining rooms is directly through the kitchen, and it's possible to reserve "the kitchen table" for prime kitchen observation space. The service is aggressively friendly, and the noise level is deafening over a soundtrack of popular Fifties Italian-American singers. Menus are posted on the wall, and prices look a little high until you see the enormous portions. The trick is to invite a hungry group of folks who can come to some consensus about what to eat and then order one appetizer or pizza, salad, pasta, entrée, and dessert for the table. As relentlessly tacky as this place is, the food is simple and actually very good. If they're serving the fragolee granita as a dessert special, order it no matter how full you think you are.