San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Restaurants on NW Military Highway embrace the present
Variety in food, prices speaks to the area
The oak trees that lift their outstretched fingers to the sky along the mile and a half of Northwest Military Highway that runs through Castle Hills from Loop 410 to LockhillSelma Road suggest a story older than the street, and much older than the salons, offices and restaurants holding their ground along that street.
The trees have been razed in some places to make way for strip centers and parking lots. They’ve been preserved in some of those lots, single specimens standing alone, rising out of the asphalt as if to say, “We were here first.”
It’s a taunt, really. Especially for the restaurants, where almost everywhere was something else first. The low-slung Hobbit hole with the 6-foot porthole window where Bilia Eatery stands was an auto garage before it was a balloon shop before it was an Asian grocery before it was Bilia.
Sushihana was a beauty salon. The Southern-styled Clementine, the Mexican cafe Los Azulejos and Dim Sum Oriental Cuisine flew the flags of Italy, Louisiana and Beijing first.
But if history is made by those who show up, the present is made by those still present. And the five restaurants that make up this edition of our weekly Eat the Street series represent Northwest Military Highway the way it is now, a cross-section of styles and price points that serve not just their neighborhood but the people in transit from the trailhead of FM 1535 through Castle Hills as it begins the journey north to Camp Bullis.
Bilia Eatery
The journey for Bilia began on Northwest Military in 2019, a sandwich shop notched into a tiny strip mall space a halfmile south of where it is now. Bryan Rojas and Mariana Wong moved it to this eclectic space behind Sushihana last year, a move made necessary by the best of reasons: They needed more space to feed Bilia’s growing success.
Their own journey began long before that, at the Miami restaurant where they met, surrounded by the bougainvilleas that would give their restaurant its name when they married and moved to San Antonio. She’s from Mexico, he’s from Colombia, both of them shaped by influences that have inspired a menu of Cuban, Argentine and San Antonio sandwiches, sharing space with Colombian arepas, South American plantains, and Mexican touches for breakfast and lunch, with plans for dinner already unfolding.
It’s a space threaded with light, a place for coffee and one of the city’s best Cuban sandwiches, filled with mojo pork marinated and braised for hours. It’s a place for a soft, fresh arepa split down the middle and filled with scrambled eggs and bacon with velvety cilantro garlic sauce. And it’s a place for a barbacoa melt and a side of guacamole with curled plantain chips.
The building’s been so many things. Now it’s Bilia’s turn to make it theirs.
1900 NW Military Highway, 210-530-1333, Facebook: @eatbilia
Clementine
John and Elise Russ opened Clementine in 2018, taking the corner space of a tan brick shopping center vacated by a middle-of-the-road Italian restaurant. They filled their drab corner with orange screens to create a foyer, with shades of cool blue to calm the eye, with an open kitchen that holds no secrets. They filled it
with creative Southern cooking, with a clever stock of good wines, with people who knew what they were doing. They filled it with life.
Nothing’s changed, and everything’s changed. COVID turned the place into an assembly line of takeout and a retail bottle shop. It’s settled back into its groove, with a menu that evolves to suit the season, a menu informed by New Orleans and the South. Fried quail, handmade cavatelli pasta, a good roast chicken, a beet salad that looks like a Pollock painting. And truffles, real ones, shaved in season at a polite price.
2195 NW Military Highway, 210-503-5121, clementine-sa.com
Dim Sum Oriental Cuisine
It’s not easy to find dim sum in San Antonio, that Chinese celebration of small plates, of shrimp shumai dumplings and fried red bean sesame balls, of chicken feet and steam buns filled with golden yolk custard. Dim Sum made it easier in
2019, living up to its name with a checklist menu of dim sum not just on the weekends but every day the doors are open.
That’s not the end of the story. Dim Sum lives in the real world, in a shopping center with a hardcore gym, a Mexican cafe, a fantasy gaming parlor and a dive bar called The Three Legged Monkey. For that world, there’s a whole separate menu of greatest hits from the Hunan, Szechuan and Cantonese canon. Orange chicken anchors a lunch special with rangoons, soup and fried rice for $9. They’ll customize the spice level for a
Veggie Delight stir-fry, and sleek ho fan noodles come with seafood, chicken or beef. Or all of the above.
The space feels more like a dining hall than a dining room. No flourishes, nothing fancy. Just you with your checklist and close to 50 kinds of dim sum in old-school bamboo steamer baskets.
2313 NW Military Highway, Suite 125, 210-340-0690, dim-sum-oriental-cuisine.com
Los Azulejos Restaurante Bar
The life of Diego Gonzalez is a story of two worlds. “I can eat in one of the poorer Mexican neighborhoods, and I can work at the Ritz-Carlton,” said the man who was raised in Mexico and learned the hospitality trade at the luxury hotel chain in Florida.
So when he and his Mexican business partner, Jaime Oliva, found this well-worn restaurant space in Castle Hills in 2019, Gonzalez felt the mission rise up from his bones: “I wanted to create authentic upscale Mexican food with the spirit of the street.”
That’s how tacos with juicy rib-eye steak and a shank of roasted bone marrow came to be. And nachos with avocado mousse and pickled red onions. And a Mexican hamburguesa laid out on a butcher’s board with ham, mozzarella, chorizo, guacamole and a silver cup of hand-cut fries. Gonzalez knows this street, this neighborhood. He’s not in Stone Oak or La Cantera, and just like the neighborhood, his menu is a high-low “mix and match,” as he calls it.
And it works, thanks to Gonzalez and his executive chef, Alberto Pawling. Chicken enchiladas are a celebration of mole, rojo and verde sauces. Chicken soup bristles with thin fingers of fried tortilla. Fried fish tacos too fat to roll up all the way in corn tortillas wear crowns of cabbage and microgreens. There’s steak and salmon and octopus, and the bar menu devotes whole sections to margaritas, mules and old fashioneds.
The mix is a match. For Gonzalez, for Los Azulejos, for Northwest Military.
2267 NW Military Highway, Suite 101, 210-281-4500, losazulejosrestaurant.com
Sushihana
Howard Hu knew when he, his family and his business partners opened Sushihana 20 years ago that sushi alone would be a hard sell in landlocked San Antonio. Raw fish on rice? Fine, but you’d better back it up with grilled teriyaki beef and lamb chops and noodles from the hot side of the kitchen.
Before Sushihana, Hu’s family already had a Chinese restaurant called Taipei on Northwest Military, where Sushishima is now. Hu said a customer at Taipei, a hairdresser named Amelia Garza, was ready to retire from her Hair Dimensions salon down the road, and she suggested they turn her space into a restaurant. They decided San Antonio needed sushi, so they took over half of the building.
The concept caught on, and in 2018, Sushihana hired architect Marcello Martinez, who expanded the bar and moved the entrance from the side to the front, where he added a tower that tied the boomerangshaped restaurant together aesthetically and raised Sushihana’s profile.
That’s a lot of names, a lot of personalities shaping Sushihana. But one of the most important came along 10 years ago when executive chef Mario Ramos joined the team. He’s cooked with James Beardwinning chef Bradley Ogden in Las Vegas, and in his immaculately organized cooler you’ll find whole bluefin tuna and toro collar hanging for sashimi, as well as sealed packs of baby red snapper and loup de mer for whole-fish preparations. You’ll also find fresh chicken wings and sous vide beef and garden rows of produce.
Lunch might include a smart combo of sushi and sashimi with tuna, salmon, yellowtail and a California roll, with a side of crispy tempura asparagus fries. From more than 30 specialty sushi rolls, the Spurs Roll incorporates marbled seaweed paper, shrimp tempura, asparagus, avocado, masago and snow crab mix. Dinner folds in lamb chops and steaks, and Hu said the ratio has shifted from 70 percent sushi-30 percent hot plates to a 60-40 mix over the years.
It’s the Sushihana way, the Northwest Military way: Find a need and fill it.