San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Cibolo’s Kindling breaks the rules for Texas food.
Note: This is a full Taste Test review, with a star rating based on multiple visits.
Thinking about Kindling Texas Kitchen in Cibolo brought to mind a song by the Austin
Lounge Lizards.
It captures how I feel about the whole big-state pride thing that drives businesses to put Texas in their names. My favorite lines go, “Our Lone Star flag’s the waviest, our fried steak’s the cream-graviest. Our cook-offs are the chiliest, our Waylon is the Williest.”
Then comes the payoff: “Let’s sing another stupid Texas song.”
Change the verb to “eat” and the noun to “dinner,” and that’s how I figure people outside Texas, and maybe some inside, feel about Texas food. Will they ever move past chicken-fried steak and chili, grow beyond barbecue and Tex-Mex? Praise the lard and pass the indignation.
Chefs Gwyn and Justin Hammerson of Kindling Texas Kitchen have the answer. And it’s yes, about a dozen different ways.
A fire-grilled pork chop honored the state’s German heritage with a cornmeal cake called pannas. It’s like custard and cornbread got together, bound in matrimony by pork fat. And it’s more than that. It’s a layer of cabbage sauteed until it’s like funky golden jam, and it’s a sauce made with sweet plums simmered down to pulp and circumstance.
Texans have a thing for pecans, and they find fresh life as granola crumbled over grilled broccoli that brought smoke, style and shaved Parmesan cheese to the eat-your-greens party. The South Texas love affair with Mexicanstyle street corn gave rise to Kindling’s Corn in a Cup, where grilled corn held court with garlic aioli and the creative twang of fermented chiles.
The menu’s small, just 11 openers and eight entrees, executed in the open kitchen of a 1911 Craftsman home full of handmade furniture and reclaimed wood. The grill cook bobs and weaves like a prizefighter around the open flames, and a young staff makes up for its lack of formality with a wealth of congeniality.
Kindling feels like dinner at the country home of people you like, maybe even relatives. Refined enough for date night, but casual enough for fried baby dill pickles or smoked oysters with Parmesan stuffing from a tin at the bar with a tall glass of vodka cherry limeade over crunchy Sonic ice or just a cold Lone Star.
Refined or simple, the Texas thread stayed true. Grilled scallops, caramelized and lush on their own, got support from creamed corn and okra. The state’s hot-weather tomato crop found its way to Summer Toast, a millennial salutation with fresh ricotta cheese and a Bob Ross canvas of heirloom tomatoes.
Grilled chicken got it right, with charred lines and juicy meat, with turnips and green beans, one with butter and the other with bacon. The wood grill breathed fire into a rib-eye with the right fat and lean ratio on a bed of roasted carrots and potatoes. And Kindling’s cornbread — toasted and sweet with honey butter — would be at home on any grandmother’s table.
Louisiana’s influence on Texas cooking came through with blackened redfish sheathed in a jetblack armor that came off light, yet more substantial than the thin gumbo beneath it. Texas Mexican food had its moment with a chile relleno full of melted Havarti and rice studded with corn and mushrooms, carried a welcome step further with glossy petals of confit chicken.
You don’t need a thematic link for a good iceberg wedge salad, but it came in the form of fried chicken skin like a sail-shaped crouton, and cowboy beans worked their $5 magic with bacon and rib-eye trimmings.
A lunch-caliber patty melt made with wild (mild) boar didn’t seem to fit with a menu geared toward dinner. But it was better than a bland salad of burrata cheese and butter lettuce that couldn’t break through even with an add-on of grilled shrimp, which deserved the respect of their own plate. And I like the high-low idea of having housefried potato chips on the menu, but Kindling could do better than office-party spinach-artichoke dip to go with it.
Even dessert at Kindling has that Texas-country-family feel to it. In the hands of Justin Hammerson’s grandmother Charlaine “Charlie” Brown, peach cobbler was the union of thump-textured crust, fresh fruit and unifying syrup we all imagine. And two of the best cakes in greater San Antonio live here, a three-layer Italian cream cake with tiny vials of rum, and a s’mores cake wearing a bruleed marshmallow like a beauty pageant sash.
It’s familiar food with an invigorated spark, a spark that helped Kindling survive the worst opening night ever, when a kitchen wall caught fire and shut down the place. That was December, and the Hammersons ran a gauntlet of contractors and city inspections to reopen in May.
They’re the right couple in the right place for a confluence of Texas foodways. They’ve been together since high school, they both worked in some of Austin’s best restaurants, and when they got married, they forged their old last names into a new name: Hammerson.
The explanation was that they had brothers and sisters to carry on the family name. They wanted to start a new branch of the family tree. Now they’re writing their own history, creating food that’s not just another stupid song about Texas.