Globe-trotting menu falls flat

By trying to be all things to all diners, tavern will disappoint most

What do Buster Keaton and Billy Idol have in common?

No, really. I’m asking. Because they both showed up at Richter Tavern in Boerne, the former in a silent movie projected on a brick wall, the latter going all “White Wedding” on the sound system booming overhead.

Separately, they’re generations and genres apart. Together, they’re a Richter Tavern metaphor of worlds colliding, sometimes in showers of pretty sparks, more often in random scatters of missed opportunity.

The pretty sparks begin at the front of the statuesque red brick building on Boerne’s main drag that began life 100 years ago as a garage, then morphed into a frumpy antiques mall before

Guy and Joi Sanders stepped in. By 2018, they’d opened the wine bar Richter Cork & Keg; then came a bakery called Richter Bakhaus.

By May 2020, they soldiered through the pandemic and transformed the rest of the old Richter building into a warren of shops crowned by Richter Tavern, a sprawling study of industrial chic framed by glass and steel but anchored by red brick and old wood. They brought in a massive saloon-style bar and installed a menu that mingled bar and grill standards with New York strip, roasted fish and handmade pasta.

That seemed like a good start, and in November 2020, I found a lot to like at Richter Tavern: a good burger, a nice steak, a smart chile-garlic shrimp.

But since then, Richter Tavern’s menu has sprawled like an unregulated subdivision. And with it comes an identity crisis. Are you Italian, with pizza and lasagna rolls? Are you a steakhouse, with chops and fish? Are you Asian fusion, with sushi and pad Thai? A wine bar, with charcuterie and 30 wines by the glass? Or are you a roadhouse, with burgers and beer?

The answer is all of them, some of them and none of them. The hits and the misses are all over the place.

The hits included a cheeseburger with big grilled flavor, thick slices of bacon and a light, buttery house-baked bun, stacked on a plate with hand-cut fries. The fries also laid a foundation for the Midwestern bar classic called poutine, dressed here with rich tawny gravy, big resilient cheese curds and pulled pork in thick, juicy threads with strong smoke.

Shrimp Brava sang a song like Spanish tapas, with pearled

shrimp in robust chile sauce over thick, cheesy grits. The tuna-salad texture of a salmon rillette threw me off, but the flavors were clean, set off by capers and thick, fluffy slices of house-baked flatbread.

But my enthusiasm faded there, replaced by curiosity and frustration.

Curiosity about why a steak was cool when it should have

been spitting fire. The beauty of an open kitchen is that you can see the pass, the ledge where plates go from the kitchen to the service staff. The danger is that sometimes you can see your plate sitting there in purgatory.

And sitting. And sitting. And by the time it gets to you, it’s a fine piece of Akaushi New York Strip that’s gone past room temperature on its way to chill.

And I was curious why tuna tartare over avocado was warm when it should have been cool and why they’d bother making sushi if their spicy tuna roll had the same presentation and taste as grocery-store sushi.

Frustration came in many forms, first with a pistachiocrusted salmon that ran stiff and dry at the edges, edging up to just two ideal bites in the center.

With a clear view of the fire-fed pizza oven, my expectations ran high for a margherita pizza with fat slices of mozzarella, ruby tomatoes and fresh basil leaves, but the crust fell limp and doughy under the load, all bubble-toasted bark and no bite.

Lasagna rolls sounded too good to be true, a way to roll and bake lasagna to order instead of cutting it from a sheet pan. The texture was right, a good combination of al dente sheet pasta, spinach and three cheese. But it tasted more like basic cafeteria lasagna, with a lingering bitter, coppery flavor that made me leave most of it behind.

The prize for the most poorly translated dish in Richter’s world tour went to pad Thai, a sad stir-fry of milky white chicken and noodles dominated by the bitter taste of bean sprouts and peanuts tossed across like they’d been spilled from a bowl of nuts at the bar.

I wish it were different. Richter Tavern is one of the most striking restaurant spaces in the area, a monument to a couple determined to make Boerne a top-flight dining destination. But the scramble to make Richter Tavern all things to all people has left it trapped in its own overproduced movie, flickering prettily against a brick wall.

Photos by Mike Sutter / Staff As it was in 2020, the cheeseburger — with bacon and American cheese on a house-baked bun, with a side of hand-cut fries — was a highlight.

Hand-cut fries created the foundation for the excellent poutine, with rich gravy, big cheese curds and juicy pulled pork.

The Parmesan-crusted fried chicken sitting atop green beans was topped with lemon butter herb sauce.

The limp and doughy margherita pizza was accompanied by a salad with butternut squash, kale, spinach and feta.

The lasagna roll with spinach, marinara sauce, and ricotta, mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses is a concept that sounds better than it tasted.

The spicy tuna sushi rolls could have come from a grocery store, but the salmon rillette on fluffly flatbread offered clean flavors.