Lunch Report: Two Bros BBQ Market on West Ave...

My wife was reading in the San Antonio Express-News Food section and saw the review on a place called Two Bros. BBQ Market that sounded pretty good. As the review reports, this place was opened by some ritzy restaurant guy, Jason Dady who has a few other places around town - Bin 555 and Tre Trattoria. Yea, I'll stick to checking out the BBQ place, someone else can report on the others.

Anyway, we decided to make the drive over and find out what all the fuss was about. I'll tell you up front, we have sort of mixed feelings about the place; some real positives and some real negatives.When you get there, you find that Two Bros. is hidden behind another restaurant, a Mexican place called El Bosque. Pull in just beyond and you will find Two Bros.What we found right off the bat was that parking can present a situation. The place was not crowded at all (based on the amount of available seating), but the parking situation was already troublesome. Perhaps they will buy out El Bosque and pave over it for more parking. Part of the issue was that people parked really goofy. The three vehicles you see above right were all parked over two rows of slots each. Maybe they need valet parking.

Anyway, as soon as you pull into the lot, the wonderful aroma of BBQ hits you. It really does smell good. We walked in and the building is very inviting; nothing to make you think you are in a ritzy place, yet everything is clean, well organized and something I especially liked, there was no uncomfortable guessing about what you were supposed to do.I have mentioned before that I often feel pressured into making a snap decision on my order because I don't fully grasp the way they menu options work or have time to figure out what I want. In this case, they use the line to get you started with drink options (beer & sodas), but with a sign letting you know that iced tea, lemonade and other stuff is available at the register. They made that sign for me. On the wall are well laid out menus showing packages you can get or, as I like, vittles by the pound. The sides are clearly identified as are the desserts and such.When it is your turn to order, the guy asks for your name, then takes the order and prints out a receipt. From there, you take your receipt to a second register where you pay and pick up any other drinks you need. As you wait to hear your name called for the order, you can be grabbing your plastic ware, pickles, jalapenos, napkins and drink lids etc.

One thing we did note is that they do not have a speaker outside for the folks sitting on the awesome patio to hear their name called. This resulted in hearing an extremely loud guy yell "Bob!" about 10 times before someone else went and popped out the door to the patio and yelled for Bob to come get his food.Speaking of the outside patio, it really is nice. Lots of picnic tables to sit at and things were not cramped at all. And of course, two things you cannot miss are the smoke house or the huge play area for the kids to climb on while mommy and daddy toss back a few cold ones.Inside, I noticed a few trees that stayed when construction began. One was behind our order taker, the other here, by the door to the patio had all sorts of wine bottle corks around it. Fancy, yet homey.About the food. We ordered 1/4 pound of brisket, 1/2 bound of pork ribs, 2 chicken thighs and small portions of sides: Mac & Cheese, beans, potato salad, and creamed corn.

I love yard bird. This texture was fine, I just didn't care for the taste. And even with their sauce, (which I did not care for), it wasn't much better. My wife was okay with the chicken. I thought the pork ribs were pretty good but my wife felt like they had used some sort of chili powder rub or something on them, giving them a uniquely bad taste. Go figure. We both agreed that the brisket was pretty good, but we also agreed that we had had much, much better. Is it possible that they are trying to turn good down home BBQ into something fancy?

A perfect case in point: the beans. They had these barbecued beans that tasted weird. I overheard another customer asking the grill man what was in the beans and he said it was peaches. Okay, but it wasn't the peaches that gave them the over the top too ritzy for their own good taste. Blech.

The potato salad was very good, the cream corn was really good and the mac & cheese was just okay. Finally, I recalled from the Express-News review that they simply raved about the
"cream-cheese-stuffed, bacon-wrapped smoked jalapenos". Puhleez. This is one of the standards that I make whenever we grill outdoors and I promise, mine are bigger, better and served hotter. Unless money grows on trees for you, don't waste the $6.00.

Which reminds me. The prices were not bad at all. I'd say that for the amount of food we got - and yes, we did take a full box of food home - Two Bros. was priced consistent with most other BBQ places we have been to.

Bottomline: If you live on that side of town, or just happen to be in the area, by all means, stop in and give Two Bros a try. But if you just must have some good BBQ, whether it be in the form of chicken, brisket, ribs or whatever, I'd unconditionally recommend Augie's Barbed Wire Smoke House over Two Bros. BBQ Market.

Crappy Job Report: The Time I got Poop in my Eye...

The other day while my wife and I traveled through some of the older parts of town to avoid contact with the construction on Loop 410, I was reminded of a brief period that I was working with my brother-in-law while waiting for details of my current contract to be worked out.

I'm not in the construction trade, but what guy would pass up the opportunity to be like Bob Vila for a few weeks while making a few dollars? If you are familiar with the neighborhoods in between IH-10 and Loop 410 between Vance-Jackson and West Avenue, you get the idea of where I am talking about.

My brother-in-law, Junior as we call him, works in the trades business. He is certainly a jack of all trades and can do electrical, plumbing, general construction, and he has also done repair of restaurant equipment and other things. This is no free advertisement or anything - so please don't e-mail me asking to see if I can get you a good rate. During the time of this story, we had been working to refurbish several rental properties around the city and had a few different property managers and Realtors that would call us for bids.

So anyway, he calls me and asks me if I can go look at a property to help him assess the situation. He says that this Realtor has a property that was vacated by the renters and that the house needs to be cleaned up. Now keep in mind, you all know that when people leave a rental property, they usually just un-ass, take the stuff they want and leave the rest. The result is, the landlord is stuck with hauling out the trash, getting rid of a dead couch and cleaning things up. A few guys and a pick-up truck can usually clear out a house in no time.

The Realtor said that “Before you make your bid, you really need to go look at the place.” Junior was pretty adamant that he could get the job done for less than $500.00. The Realtor again said, “No, you need to see the place”.

You have no doubt heard of cat ladies that have 68 cats living in a house, crapping everywhere, newspapers piled up, opened cans of cat food sitting all over the place. This was worse. No cats.

The people who lived in the house were no doubt sick.

When I first peered through the window, I though I might be in beer drinker’s heaven. It was this experience which taught me to take my camera with me everywhere I go. If I had the camera to take pictures, you might find it easier to believe this.

This 3 bedroom, 2-bath house was a sea of beer cans and trash piled 2 feet high. But, they had small paths leading to strategic locations like the refrigerator, the bathroom, and the front door. I refused to enter the house for fear of rats. The beer cans and the 18-pack cardboard cases were left in place as if the occupants had simply arranged to have a non-stop supply of beer delivered, and that they sat there and drank one beer, dropped the can and opened the next. When the first case was finished, they simply opened the next and so on and so on until their was an 1,800 square foot house full of beer cans, pizza boxes, dirty laundry, discarded tissues and so on.

Oh, the bathrooms were a hoot. And yes, beer cans in the bathrooms. The walls of the shower stall and the tub were covered in mold. And for some reason, they stopped putting the toilet paper in the toilet – they just wiped their butts and threw the toilet paper on the floor. Perhaps they had visited Mexico and decided to be exotic or something.

So, long story short, Junior had to hire some other workers he found to clear out the entire house. In addition to $650.00, he told them they could take anything that wasn’t nailed down that they wanted (nice side by side refrigerator at Best Buy - $1,200 – the mold encased version, free). These guys came in with gloves, masks, shovels and a huge truck and cleared the place in a matter of hours.

You can empty the contents, but you can’t empty the filth. That’s when I showed up with a power washer. Bob Vila would never recommend using a power washer inside a house on solid wood floors and sheetrock. I march to the beat of a different drummer I suppose.

The worst part was when I aimed the power washer at one of the toilets.

Big mistake.

Apparently, when they decided that the toilet was running too much, they decided to turn off the water supply to it. Well, apparently, that didn’t stop someone from taking a dump in it. By the time I got there with my power washer, the poop in the pot had dried. Dried feces and 2300 psi from the power washer equals a whole new game of foul smelling doo-doo flying back at you.

Thank God I have fast reflexes. But I could not dodge the smell. I literally threw up on the spot.

I ran out of the house and threw up in the yard. I waited a few minutes to regain my composure and decided to go in for another whiff. I threw up again.

In the end, I had to hold my breath long enough to get a hose through the bathroom window into the toilet so I could try to clear things up. I let the hose run full blast for 15 minutes before it cleared the funk from the bathroom. Oh, it was a total of 4 times that I threw up.

Okay, three days later, the house was clean and the real estate lady did not even recognize the place. She was in shock. Turns out, it was her house and she had been letting her daughter and her family live there, and the reason the house was vacated was that she had moved them into a new house she bought in a nicer neighborhood.

Attention residents of Stone Oak: Your new neighbor is Joe Dirt!