"TMOliver" > writes:

>Laughably, one example of the dearth of edibles cited was College Station,

Now, Tom, I didn't "cite" that, I stated that my guess had been that
College Station was unlikely to be particularly good--and that guess
was an extrapolation from my (not hitherto expressed, here, lately
at least) opinion that, contrary to Cape Cod Bob's opinion, "college
towns" are likely to have good restaurants. That's never been my
experience (not counting large conurbations like NYC or Boston/Cambridge
which have colleges in them but aren't in any sense "college towns").
Bob, if you're there, do you maintain that the environs of Cape Cod
Community College have particularly good food (better than what you
might find elsewhere on the Cape)? Certainly my neighboring college,
UMass-Dartmouth (formerly Southeastern Massachusetts University, and
before that the New Bedford Textile Institute) hasn't contributed a
damned thing to local cuisine (which has fine exemplars). And in
Worcester, MA, though there happen to be a decent Ecuadorian restaurant
and a quite good Vietnamese restaurant within a few blocks of Clark
University, both are too far outside the pusillanimous students' comfort
zone to have any significant number of Clarkies eating in them. Etc.,
etc.

I'm glad to hear that I *could* have had good eats in College Station
(if I hadn't had a riproaring cold that made the prospect of getting to
the Austin airport more important than almost any other goal at that
moment).

But I swear that on the direct route fron Huntsville to Austin,
there didn't appear to be a damned thing.

>As for Asian
>food in Europe, except in Paris, it's almost laughable compared to that
>available in Houston, SoCal, San Francisco or the Seattle/Vancouver area.

What always astounds me is that I can't find decent Asian food in Geneva.

>Let's face it folks....Those of you for whom the Cafe Texan is any more than
>a routine stop for "Southern Road Food", who have not eaten sliced brisket
>off butcher paper at the market in Lockhart, and don't understand that there
>are two mutually incompatible regional versions, "East Texas Dipped and Deep
>Fried" and "West Texas Pounded and Pan Fried", of Chicken Fried Steak (the
>West Texas version authentically descended from Central European cooks who
>have pounded cutlets for centuries and still do and a cousin to all those
>"Milanesas" on menus from Buenos Aires to Monterey), are as terminally
>unaware as are the silly Americans who claim to be unable to find good eats
>in Paris.

So I assume both my (probably) Amarillo CFS and my Huntsville CFS were
East Texan? What's its roots, then?

I wasn't (as long as I'm being defensive) holding the Cafe Texan up as
an examplar of other than "Southern Road Food"--I did eat better in both
Austin and Houston, but don't remember the names of the places my hosts
there took me on that trip. Still, the well-buttered beans were memorable.

Lee Rudolph