San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
A place to find your culinary Bliss
From roast duck with foie gras to expert wait staff, this is among S.A.’s best
Duck with foie gras and a glass of Burgundy. That’s what I ordered at Bliss during a review cycle five years ago. This month, my waiter at Bliss remembered what I ordered five years ago.
And where I sat when I ordered it.
It’s called institutional memory, and it says a lot for
Bliss. It says the upscale Southtown restaurant opened by chef Mark Bliss and his wife, Lisa, in 2012 has been around long enough to develop that kind of memory in the first place, that it can keep a steady professional staff and that it fosters the kind of food worth remembering.
The duck that helped put Bliss on the map 10 years ago is still on the menu. So are the crispy oyster sliders and the seared scallops with cheese grits. In fact, not much has changed in the decade since Bliss opened in the renovated shell of a gas station. Here’s why that’s a good thing.
To start with, the building itself has good bones, a mix of old and new with modern touches of glass and steel around a frame of sturdy exposed brick to give it a sense of time and place. The uniformed staff cycles in and out of the space, ready to provide evocative food descriptions and put to use a solid working knowledge of a wine list that ranges from a rich Napa cab or a tart German riesling by the glass to a refined bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
Adding depth to the wine experience, they helped me sort through the charcuterie list to pick brie, chorizo, smoked duck, honeycomb and Calabrian peppers. From runners to roving managers to waiters with steeltrap memories, it’s one of the best service experiences in the city.
If the menu changes little year after year, it’s because what’s there works so well, executed by chef de cuisine Tony Hernandez. The duck, for example, changes out only its jacket of side dishes to stay au courant with the season and currently sports pureed butternut squash. Capped with perfectly rendered fat, the sliced duck breast glowed with game-meat aromatics without going gamey, taken even further into lushville with a small lobe of foie gras caramelized like a blowtorched dessert.
The scallops that have abided unchanged for a decade came through with a perfect glass-crackle sear on top over
sweet pearled meat whose flavors melted effortlessly into a bed of cheese grits.
A pan-seared snapper offered redemption from one of the few dishes that didn’t work from my review five years ago, this time cooked to a perfect opaque silkiness set off by a tangy saffron beurre blanc and black pearls of truffled caviar. Set on a bed of creamy cilantro risotto, the composed dish also put sunchokes to good use, those ugly tubers with the buttery flavor that potatoes can only dream about.
Nobody ever earned fancy-pants chef points for a grilled tenderloin steak. Bliss made steps toward changing that with a steak crowned by a tower of onion rings held upright by wishful thinking and a waiter’s steady hand. The crispy onions were just one of four side
elements supporting a steak I could’ve cut with my fork, joined by cauliflower florets, blistered shishito peppers and a layered ingot of twice-baked potato gratin.
Some of the best moments at Bliss came first, with starters that have flourished over time. Chef Mark Bliss perfected crispy oysters in his time with celebrated Biga on the Banks chef Bruce Auden, and today they’re as good as ever: four tiny sliders built on baby biscuits with meltaway fried oysters and a drape of brown-butter hollandaise and tumbles of candied bacon. Show me a better one-bite masterpiece in San Antonio.
Two starters at Bliss form a charming surf-and-turf melody that still rocks. Hamachi tostadas played the light notes, combining raw fish with creamy avocado,
cool ginger slaw and sharp spikes of jalapeño on crispy corn tortillas. Bone marrow played the heavier notes starting with the canoe of a marbled roasted bone filled with that primal jelly of the gods we call marrow, then finished with a well-mannered tenderloin tartare.
One of just two dishes that didn’t connect was one I haven’t seen at Bliss before: a bowl of braised and shredded rabbit over polenta. It seemed too rustic to run with Bliss’ gang of composed, precise dishes, more of a onenote play on roast beef and gravy where the flavors languished in tones of neutral brown.
My other issue with the rabbit was a decidedly first-world complaint. When the waiter mentioned freshly shaved truffles as an option, I bit. They covered the bowl and made it hard to taste anything else. As a $42
add-on, the truffles pushed the rabbit’s price to $90. Truffles are expensive, I know, but I wasn’t doing math when the waiter said a half-ounce but didn’t say the price. I didn’t think the end result justified the expense.
The other disconnect was a Thai ice cream sandwich dessert that relied on the easy comfort of snickerdoodle cookies without capitalizing on the potential of Thai-influenced ice cream. In no way did that represent the full dessert experience at Bliss, though.
The best representatives of the restaurant’s luxe, sweet endings were a butter cake sculpture like a Michelin-star tres leches and the enduring Bliss confection known as the Chocolate Bar, a gooey, decadent flourless cake set off with caramel, coffee gelato and — because why not? — caramel popcorn.
Dining at Bliss is a trip, an experience that feels timeless and on trend at the same time. And while 10 years is hardly forever in the restaurant world, looking at an old menu from Bliss is like looking at that photo in the bar in “The Shining.” Like Jack Nicholson, there are those oysters, right there up top, as much an institutional memory as a testament to what Bliss is accomplishing today.