Not Enough Time in Austin

Last night we were originally planning to go have some fancy barbeque at Lambert's, but at the last minute we changed our minds and decided to go to Uchiko instead. Holy crap. What an incredible meal. Chef Tyson Cole won the 2011 James Beard Award for Best Chef – Southwest, and Executive Chef Paul Qui won the 2012 James Beard Award for Best Chef – Southwest. (Paul was also the winner of last season's Top Chef.) We had the chef's tasting menu and everything was delicious, creative, amazing. If you like (contemporary) Japanese…highly recommended. Menu is here, but nothing you read there can really describe how incredible each bite tastes. The tasting menu is 10 courses of small plates to share. Our two favorite things were the koviche (fresh diver scallop, tomatillo, kala­mata, black lime — OMG how do they make ingredients taste like that together???) and a wagyu beef (smoked for three days) nigiri with some fresh Japanese wasabi on top. Perfection.

After dinner we went for a much needed walk. We walked down to Zilker Park and then crossed over Barton Springs Road and walked back past the RV park to Lamar, turned left, crossed over the river Lady Bird Lake and then walked back to the Airstream at Pecan Grove. There's some great neon on Barton Springs Road — my iPhone did a surprisingly good job capturing it, don't you think?

These guys have a bit of a kerning problem:

Day before yesterday for lunch and then again that night we visited with a long-time friend of Kevin's who lives in Austin (Hi Tom!). We went to dinner with his family and had some delicious Mexican pastries for dessert at their beautiful home. Here's the view from their deck:

We're heading to New Braunfels today, but we might have to come back to Austin because we didn't even scratch the surface of the list of restaurants we wanted to try.