San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Biscuits shine at Alamo Biscuit Co. & Panadería.
Down-home comfort food goes deliciously upscale
Note: This is a full Taste Test review, with a star rating based on multiple visits.
Ceasar Zepeda understands the value of streamlining. At Sangria on the Burg, he curated a menu focused around tacos and sliders and made it good enough to break into the Express-News “Top 100 Dining & Drinks” guide.
Zepeda’s taken that same honed-in approach with Alamo Biscuit Co. & Panadería, working with business partner John Vale to bake anywhere from 800 to 1,400 biscuits a day for a breakfast and lunch menu that capitalizes on the versatile charms of that country comfort food.
Every biscuit was a snowflake, a unicorn, a fingerprint with unique ridges and whorls and distinct patterns of toasted gold. Some were short and stout, some extruded like a concertina in full draw. But within their DNA was a code for biscuits with proper crusty crowns and fluffed interiors with a balance of salt, butter, crumb and layered flake.
Biscuit accomplished.
From there, Alamo Biscuit assembled a wardrobe of biscuit accessories. Five kinds of gravy, housemade sausage and chorizo, smoked bacon, fried chicken thighs, popcorn shrimp, eggs in all their breakfast incarnations.
In their brawny breakfast context, the biscuits supported some strong and simple results, like a fluffy payload of scrambled eggs with American cheese and a rough sausage patty with the spice and style of something made by hand. And I kept coming back to biscuits covered in good sausage gravy with a low pepper growl and crumbles of that fresh sausage.
The chicken biscuit took a Chick-fil-A vow of simplicity with fried chicken and bread. And like that spartan sandwich, Alamo Biscuit’s version worked — and it worked even better because biscuits are better than buns any day, and chicken thighs make better chicken tenders.
The ABC Burger offered more proof that biscuits work better than buns. The toasted top and goose-down layers underneath dovetailed with the louche velvet flow of American cheese and a fat beef patty. It was pushed to the max like it had a personal trainer yelling, “Poblano jam now! Get that bacon!”
The kitchen kept up as the complexity escalated. Taking the shrimp-and-grits formula to a
San Antonio place, Alamo supplemented fried popcorn shrimp with Zepeda’s own Mama’s Salsa, with big tomato-chile flavor braced by chunks of smoked sausage. The biscuit stole the carb show, easily overshadowing a layer of grits that should have been twice as thick.
The best biscuit upgrade was the most surprising. Creamed spinach is fine, but on a biscuit with a fried egg? Yes. Especially with Alamo’s mushroom gravy, with a rich and earthy flavor like something from a high-tone bistro.
In that upmarket spirit, Alamo also put together flights of mimosas, among them a refreshing trio of prosecco-spiked mango, pineapple and pomegranate at a solid $8 value.
With their sturdy disposition, biscuits lend themselves naturally to a buffet setting. And Alamo’s small buffet line was a good way to sample through nice poblano gravy, spicy orange chorizo gravy, fat strips of applewood-smoked bacon, perfectly sauteed vegetables and pulled pork as good as almost any barbecue shop in town.
With mango, raspberry and blackberry jams this good, I could make a whole breakfast out of biscuits and jam, never mind the scrambled eggs and potato hash and chicken tenders fighting for my attention.
The buffet was good 30 minutes after it was put out, but on other visits I watched it fade as the afternoon came, with gravy gone thick and tired, picked-over sides and as many biscuit crumbs as biscuits. It started strong, but a buffet should be as good 30 minutes before it shuts down as it was 30 minutes after it started.
Still, the buffet was a better sampling forum than the biscuit “flights,” with two small biscuits cut in half and laid out as four flat-top vehicles for a quartet of gravies or jams. I felt like a kid sharing biscuits with my brother, and not in a good way. I’m grown, and I want a whole biscuit. A proper biscuit has a beginning, a middle and an end like a good story, and the flights cut that story in half.
Beyond the biscuit canon (how about a biscuit cannon?), Alamo produced good poblano-cheddar grits, a colorful house salad with candied pecans and dried strawberries, and a breakfast taco with astonishingly good smoked brisket for a place that doesn’t have BBQ in the name.
Panadería is part of the name, though. Two of the best things I ate at Alamo Biscuit came from the bakery. One was an empanada, big and greasy and breakapart flaky, with cinnamon sugar like sand on a beach and a heart of mango jam. The other was a cinnamon roll the size of a softball, shrouded in icing that covered everything but the calorie count.
The stout Mexican conchas, powdery wedding cookies and pig-shaped gingerbread marranitos from the bakery were like Sunday morning at a good momand-pop panadería. They seemed like wide-eyed innocents in this swipe-right palace of biscuit hookups.
At Alamo, their business is biscuits, and business is good. And most of the time, that’s good enough.