San Antonio

12  March 2024

To acclimatise myself for the upcoming and venerated ‘Twisted Sisters’ ride across West Texas, I take the rural route from Austin to San Antonio. It's pretty good with polite drivers waving me past and observing the speed limits as well they might as they are correct. 65 or 70 MPH where there's no traffic or buildings around is right. The pettifogging, puritanism that has infected most of Europe now on this point has yet to reach Texas and I sense, never will. After two weeks of dead-straight interstates, this is the first time I've seen any curves and the bike feels heavy, even on the most gentle deviations.

It's only about 120 miles to San Antonio and it’s huge: the seventh-largest city in the US with a 1.3 million population. Surveying it from the freeway, I estimate it's about the same size as Birmingham in the UK. It is in terms of population but San Antonio covers 500 square miles, five-times the area.

Depending on your persuasion, the Alamo is either the enduring symbol of Texan independence, a 17th-century Catholic Church or the punch line to a very funny joke, delivered by the late Brian Glover in ‘An American Werewolf in London’. If you’ve never seen the film, you may remember him immortal as the borderline illiterate inmate, Cyril Heslop, in ‘Porridge’ uttering the line: “I read a book once…green it was.” Regardless, the Alamo is tiny but clearly of huge cultural significance to the locals, albeit in inverse proportion to everything else in the state.

Nearby, is the Riverwalk, a circular canal around downtown. It’s one-part Venice, one-part Canary Wharf (London’s newish financial district, albeit now forty years old), and one-part the UK’s Birmingham insofar it’s a decent attempt at urban regeneration. But mostly, it’s Blackpool Pleasure Beach with a dash of Disneyland thrown in for good measure. The British pub is the only remotely authentic venue insofar that it stinks of BO, cheap alcohol and vom. So I leave pronto and take a half-mile hike to the Filling Station craft, a craft ale pub near the Pharma Table Apothecary Kitchen for dinner.

Their menu “is assembled through an Ayurvedic lens for digestion from lightest to heaviest“ and “ingredients are hyper-local yet globally inspired, and change with the seasons.” That’s not all… They also “anaerobically compost all organic waste as well as actively supporting regenerative farming through careful selection of vendors”. Not understanding what any of this meant, I had to find out what it tasted like, of course. But they don’t open on a Monday or a Tuesday, taking a break for spiritual rejuvenation or whatever.

So instead, I head back through the lumbering hordes, on the too-small river walkways, to find Domingo’s, a cutting-edge, Tex-Mex Restaurant on the central island.

It’s superb: ‘El Campo’ is a salad of Baby Spinach, Golden Beets, Strawberries, Gorgonzola, Candied Pepitas, Coconut Chips with a Jalapeño Lime Vinaigrette, and tastes just as zingy as it reads. To follow, ‘Halibut Rojo’ with a Calabacita Stew and Pickled Onion is so much more than the sum of the parts to the point the waitress looked at me balefully, as I scraped every last drop from the bowl. The protocol kids are taught in the US is: “Leave a little for Mr. Manners” and to behave like me indicates you haven’t been served enough and can be construed as insulting to the host.

Once outside the Riverside area, it’s clear this is a rather cool city with live music bars, restaurants and a young crowd so I stroll back through two the hotel in the warm evening, contented on all counts.  I’d noticed a quote from Virginia Woolf on the wall of the Magnolia Cafe in Austin earlier that day: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” so I finish writing this and am out like a light.