After a short deliberation, we headed over to Angie's, on East 7th Street. Angie's used to be at 900 E. 7th, and they're now a couple of blocks east of there, and across the street. The new building is a lovely, muted yellow fortress of food in the most attractive style of imposing Mexican colonial, complete with a colonnade, cupola, heavy wooden doors, and warm tile throughout. It's nice, but it rather reminded me of Las Vegas in that its scale and location, set well off the street so as to be almost hidden to passing traffic, didn't quite jive with the surroundings - mostly typical early 1900s Texas farmhouse style structures, and eclectic law firms and other businesses. I suspect many regulars from the old location, which was one of those very same old, vernacular, East Austin houses, will not be impressed with the Dallas-suburb-style building (which reminds me of Abuelo's, a chain restaurant I first encountered in the cookie cutter hell that is Plano).
Nevertheless, the place is clearly firmly within the Tex-Mex tradition, and the cheese enchiladas were pretty much just what you'd expect. They were gooey, greasy, and cheesy. Oftentimes such establishments overdo the pepper or onions, but Angie's got it just about right.
The cheese was especially on-the-mark. It wasn't too glue-like - sometimes they just put industrial enchilada cheese sticks in the middle of tortillas and throw them in an oven (and you can tell, because the result will taste like a piece of string cheese wrapped in a tortilla) - not the case here. This was proper orange, melty, warm, comfort cheese.Made with Angie's rightfully famous homemade corn tortillas, it was almost a shame to have their flavor largely masked by the ranchera sauce. Since I'm a vegetarian, I have trouble with sauces. Very often in real Mexican restaurants, where the staff are not as used to customers whose palates have been dulled by thirty years of El Chico, the waitress simply cannot understand what I mean by "no carne" or, even, "vegetariano". It's difficult in these otherwise delicious establishments to get something other than cheese enchiladas with cheese sauce, which may be fine as far as colon cancer goes, but are nevertheless a bit bland day after day, week after week. The waitress here, who was in fact Angie's niece, and covering as a favor, immediately suggested the vegetarian ranchera sauce, which was pretty much what I would make at home for an authentic Tex-Mex enchilada sans the ubiquitous chili con carne sauce. Usually made from chicken broth, but possibly from vegetable broth (if being touted as "vegeterian" here in hippy-dippy Austin), it is whipped up in a skillet with some flour, and usually has some pepper, cumin, and a dash of chili powder or paprika, as well. I think this sauce probably also had a little of the typical tomato paste, but just enough. I don't personally like tomato-heavy sauces, and certainly not in Mexican food. More melty, melty cheese was smothered over the top of the three (count 'em, three for $7!) enchiladas.
The rice and beans were 100% standard Tex-Mex. In that they complimented each bite of enchilada, and provided a satisfying sauce to mop with the last of the tortilla chips (also very good here - thin but not undercooked), and were otherwise totally unremarkable. I love some good beans, but the standard Tex-Mex cheese enchilada plate does not, as a rule, have "good" beans. Just beans. I also suspect that there's a factory out there somewhere churning out big vats of perfectly uniform, suspiciously yellow, somewhat sticky "Spanish" rice to every Mexican restaurant in Texas.
Angie's also has sopapillas, which I would like to have sampled, but after three whiskey sours, two Dr Peppers, and three cheese enchiladas, I was finished.
Rating: 4/5
Angie's Mexican Restaurant
900 E. 7th St
Austin, TX 78702-3217
Phone: (512) 476-5413
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