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Chicken-fried Steak Countdown, Part 11 (#2-1)
Posted on Thursday, November 16 @ 17:24:30 PST
Topic: Chicken-fried Steak
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It all ends today with the top two. Really. On to the food...
2. AllGood Café. 2934 Main Street.
AllGood Café strives to be a little pocket of Austin in the city of Dallas. The Deep Ellum restaurant regularly hosts local and regional musical talent, and posters for the acts line the walls. They make efforts to support local food purveyors, including The Mozzarella Company, Rudolph's Market, Jimmy's Food Store, and Empire Baking Company. (I would like to see them scrap the Blue Bell and hook up with Henry's, but you can't always get what you want.) They offer a selection of seasonal side dishes. It doesn't take long to figure out that--unlike most comfort food joints in town--these guys give a damn.
Attention to detail is reflected in the quality of the sides. Mashed potatoes are smooth, a little peppery, and rich, without going over the top with butter or cream. Seasonal sides off the blackboard are always a good pick. The corn with peppers pictured above features nicely sweet corn that has been cut off a cob (rather than shaken out of a freezer bag), mixed with diced, fresh jalapeno and bell peppers. Seasonal greens aren't cooked to mush. In terms of combined quality and selection of side dishes, AllGood Café was probably the best of the 60+ restaurants I visited in the Dallas area.
The chicken-fried steak has been consistently good. They use well-tenderized tenderloin for the CFS, giving it good tenderness, but also above-average flavor and a very pleasant texture. Breading is thin and exceptionally crisp, often to the point of brittleness. The crispness of the breading coupled with occasional mild loose-sockiness can make it hard to keep everything together. But the breading tastes so good that it's a flavorful, textural delight to sweep up loose bits of crust into a bite of mashed potatoes. Though there have been some modest bobbles in a couple of visits (e.g., slightly loose sock or a bit too much greasiness in the breading), they're the exception. Most of the time, AllGood Café's chicken-fried steak is an unqualified pleasure.
AllGood Café also makes a chili. Brick red, tomatoey, and gently spicy, I couldn't resist the idea of ordering a cup so I could try AllGood's CFS cowboy style.
Though more earthiness and spiciness in the chili (e.g., from cumin and dried chiles) would've made it a better match for the CFS, it was still a fairly successful pairing. The breading held up remarkably well, remaining crisp all the way to the last bite. Unless the cowboy treatment strikes your fancy, though, you're probably better off sticking with the straight CFS.
AllGood Café scores highly with a consistently enjoyable CFS and refreshing quality and breadth of selection of sides. Though priced slightly above market ($10 for lunch, $11 for dinner), portion sizes are generous and quality is even more above market, making it a reasonable value. Highly recommended. Grade: B+.
1. Ozona Grill & Bar. 4615 Greenville Avenue.
Ozona Grill & Bar sits a couple blocks south of Central Market on Greenville Ave., recessed from the road and with poor visibility. Looking at the front of the place for the first time, it can be hard to even find the entrance. Given the restaurant's look and location, some might be tempted to dismiss it as a mere watering hole for the more boorish college element. But Ozona is a sleeper.
One sign that there's more to Ozona than meets the eye...the menu shows that they have Abita root beer on tap, both for drinking and for floats. Abita's root beer, made with natural spring water and Louisiana cane sugar, is one of the best on the market. Though Abita can often be found in glass bottles at Central Market and The Soda Gallery, I'm unaware of any other restaurant in Dallas that serves it. The fact that Ozona takes the trouble to carry a superb root beer (in a market where most would be perfectly content with IBC, or even A&W or Barq's) hints at similar attention to detail and commitment to quality elsewhere in the menu.
Every CFS order at Ozona comes with a choice of salad. Most of the side salads I've endured over the course of these reports consisted of iceberg scraps with a little onion and unripe tomato, with a cup or packet of manufactured dressing on the side. A couple (e.g., Rio Ranch and Bone Daddy's) were a cut above in freshness and interest level. Ozona's spinach salad blows them all out of the water. It consists of spinach, crumbled bacon, diced hard-boiled egg, chopped pecans, and sliced cremini mushrooms, tossed (what a concept!) with a tasty honey mustard, then topped with shredded cheddar and jack, crunchy house-made croutons, and beautifully fried jalapenos. It's a busy salad, but one where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. If for some strange reason Ozona discontinued its CFS (heaven forfend), I'd come back for the entrée version of this salad.
In addition to the salad, the CFS comes with fries, as pictured at the top of this article. Unfortunately, the fries are mediocre. They have good flavor, but are never crisp and are sometimes a bit greasy. It's a mystery to me how everything else they fry (e.g., jalapenos, CFS, chicken tenders, etc.) can turn to pure gold, but the fries come out limp every time. The fries are very consistent, which may mean that they're making them this way deliberately. Maybe I'm narrow-minded in wanting crisp fries, but I doubt I'm alone.
The fries were a nagging concern until one day I thought to ask for a substitution of garlic mashed potatoes. Bingo. Ozona's garlic mashed potatoes are the best I've had in this serious of reports. They use skin-on red potatoes, resulting in a moister, less starchy texture. The dairy is just about right. The kicker is the garlic. Most garlic mashed potatoes I've had in these reports contained pureed raw garlic. Ozona's mashed potatoes are loaded with large chunks of roasted cloves of garlic, delivering an intense garlic flavor with an underlying sweetness instead of a harsh edge.
Then there's the CFS. For the meat, Ozona uses top butt (from the sirloin). They enhance the cut's natural tenderness mechanically, producing a tender chicken-fried steak almost every time. The real payoff comes in the flavor department. Almost every CFS I've had at Ozona has a pleasantly robust, beefy flavor. Looking solely at the flavor quality of the underlying beef, Ozona is the best of the 70+ restaurants I've visited for chicken-fried steak in the past year. (The only potential rivals are Ouisie's, which also uses top butt, and Perry's, which uses Prime rib eye.)
Ozona's breading is always crisp and well seasoned, not upstaging the flavor of the beef, nor getting lost in the background. The sweet, mildly peppery cream gravy goes great with the beef and breading, but is totally unnecessary to enjoyment of the dish. (As always, request the gravy on the side so you can control the amount and timing of its application.)
Ozona also makes a chili, so I had to take the CFS for a cowboy-style spin. This was the most successful pairing of chili and CFS I've had, apart from the Martinez original. Ozona's chili wasn't as tomatoey as AllGood's or as rich and bold as Perry's, which proved to be a virtue. It had a mild flavor, wasn't too sweet, and tended to compliment--rather than cover--the taste of the underlying chicken-fried steak. The breading held up well to the chili for a while, but eventually started to soften. (If you go this route, get the chili on the side and spoon it on a little at a time.) Though the combination worked, my preference is still for a straight CFS--especially when it's as good as Ozona's.
Did I mention the price? At $6.95 for the lunch portion and $9.50 for dinner, Ozona's chicken-fried steak is actually slightly below the average price for CFS in Dallas. Tender, flavorful meat. Crisp, well seasoned crust. Great garlic mashed potatoes and side salad. Consistent performance. For my money, Ozona's chicken-fried steak is the best in Dallas. Grade: B+.
As a final note, I'll just mention that I was tempted to declare Ozona and AllGood a tie. They're both exceptional CFSs, but with distinct personalities. Some might prefer the crisper crust and smooth grain of AllGood's tenderloin-based chicken-fried steak. Some will prefer the more assertive, beefy flavor of Ozona's sirloin. Beatles versus the Stones. Try them both and decide which floats your boat. For me, it's "Sticky Fingers" at Ozona.
Links to other CFS reports: Introduction; Part 1 (#50-46); Part 2 (#45-41); Part 3 (#40-36); Interlude in Austin; Part 4 (#35-31); Part 5 (#30-26); Calibration in Fort Worth and Suburbs; Part 6 (#25-21); Part 7 (#20-16); Part 8 (#15-11); Calibration in Houston; Part 9 (#10-6); Chicken-fried Steak: The Album; Part 10 (#5-3); CFS à la Mode; Part 11 (#2-1).
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