San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Turkey Chupacabra a monstrous delight
Pizza-by-the-slice favorite also turns out a solid meatball sub, muffuletta
Old gas stations have great stories to tell, and the best of them involve the evolution from fuel for cars to fuel for the drivers of those cars.
That’s how The Station Cafe came to be, built on the bones of an old Texaco station in the King William Historic District.
Jon and Stacie Rowe signed the lease on the building in 2006, making a name with pizza by the slice and eventually expanding to an adjacent building, adding sandwiches and converting the original space into the Filling Station Tap Room.
The pizza’s good enough to land The Station Cafe among San Antonio’s Top 10 places for pizza by the slice. But with more than 25 hot and cold sandwiches on the menu supported by fluffy white sandwich rolls baked in-house, it’s a Solid Neighborhood Option for the lunch crowds that pack the colorful tables of this spare, blue-collar cafe.
Best sandwich: Turkey at a sandwich place is a lot like roasted chicken at a nice restaurant: Nobody really orders it because they love it; they order it because it’s neutral and healthy-ish. The Turkey Chupacabra begs to differ. Sure, it’s a pileup of hot sliced deli turkey at its core. But the core’s supercharged with a serrano pepper sauce that added a self-balancing charge of creaminess and heat tempered by melted cheddar and cooled down by lettuce and tomato.
It was a solid value by itself at $7.50, but like all the sandwiches in this report, I threw that value equation off its axis by adding soup, potato salad and pasta salad at $4 apiece, half the cost of the sandwiches — and the weaker half at that. None of them justified the 50 percent price bump. A $1.50 bag of chips can handle the job just fine.
Other sandwiches: It makes sense that a place with good pizza by the slice could pull off a good meatball sandwich ($7.99). The Station Cafe’s bright and sweet marinara folded around meatballs with a satisfying Italian herb profile came to life under a generous winterweight duvet of melted mozzarella.
Staying in an Italian frame of mind, the Italian sandwich ($7.50) illustrated how keeping things simple can pay off, especially with a layered coldcut trio of salami, pepperoni and turkey pastrami spiked
with Italian dressing over lettuce and tomato with sliced mozzarella. It’s the kind of combo that relies on good bread to bring it home, and The Station’s home-baked bread did just that.
I bring up simplicity to contrast the hazards of overkill, a condition that kept the San Antonio Cheese Steak ($8.25) from being its best. While I liked the tender roast beef, the duo of melting mozzarella
and cheddar cheeses, and the jalapeños, there was no logical flavor space for a schmear of Alabama white BBQ sauce. The Coco Chanel doctrine holds true for fashion and sandwiches alike: “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.”
There’s no way to build a muffuletta without things getting complicated. It’s a New Orleans thing. But the controlled chaos of the Station Muffuletta ($7.75) never strayed from the style’s intent: the mellow slyness of olives, the green-eyed monster of chopped peppers, the fatty attitude of salami and the sophisticated elán of turkey all working together under a canopy of melted cheddar on a properly toasted roll.