Like Cameron Diaz with a West Texas Drawl

Green Chile Willy's
13651 Interstate 27, at McCormick
Amarillo, Texas

It's just a simple metal building, plopped down between the frontage road and a horse farm. Inside the decor is typical of many Texas restaurants: framed, autographed pictures of local celebrities, some western impedimenta, some old sepia-toned photos. Not a very large place. In fact, not nearly large enough for the crowds it attracts. We got there just in time: we were seated immediately; fifteen minutes later, all the seats in the waiting area were taken.

The menu is as simple as the architecture: fried chicken; chicken fried steak; burgers; and side dishes like fried corn and baked potatoes. I went for the Jalapeño Jack chicken fried steak; my friend Rick opted for the chicken fried chicken.

Our waitress, the title character of this post, greeted us as though we were old friends come to call, but with a degree of sincerity that is hard to fake. When Rick asked for sweet tea, she told him they only had unsweetened, "But can you stick your finger in it?" An old line, but delivered with such unforced charm that it still works. She was attentive throughout our meal, but without hovering. She struck just the right balance between visiting with her customers and getting her work done, and we could see that no one in the place felt any lack of attention from any of the staff.

Both our meals were priced at $11.25, though the menu did claim that all the chicken fried steaks were "Texas sized," and both meals included a salad and one side order. Still, I thought the price a little on the high side. My initial dissatisfaction with that aspect of the visit increased when I found that Texas is not as big in the Panhandle as it is in the rest of the state. I expected a CFS that draped over the sides of a respectable platter; I got one about the size of a dessert plate. Big enough to satisfy the stomach, but not the eyes. I know, I'm better off not having gotten some gigantic slab of breaded meat, but I had kind of been hoping for leftovers for tomorrow's lunch.

See my comment, below,
re the "value" rating

I certainly didn't leave with any sense of dissatisfaction, however. It may not have been the absolute best CFS I've ever had, but it's up there. The breading was a little crunchy, as it should be, and well seasoned; the meat was good quality, and the cream gravy was excellent. The best part of it, though, were the added ingredients of jalapeños and shredded Monterrey Jack cheese, which were present in just great enough quantity to add their flavours to the mix with clarity, not intruding on the simple pleasure of CFS with cream gravy, but augmenting it. Rick's chicken fried chicken had the same combination of ingredients, and was equally tasty. 

The side dishes were done with a precise hand. Simple foods like these are hard to screw up, but also hard to excel at. Yet the kitchen at Green Chile Willy's Grill has excelled. The green beans I had were fresh, cooked long enough to be tender but not so long as to get mushy, and seasoned with a tangy mixture of spices that does not appear to include bacon or fatback. They were delicious. And Rick's baked potato was large but perfectly baked, with plenty of the toppings that make a baked potato so heart-clogging good. 

The kitchen at Green Chile Willy's is geared toward speed. Salads, condiments, toppings and such are packaged in the slow times for quick delivery when the crowds start pouring in, but they achieve that speed without sacrificing appreciably on quality. It's a good thing, because the lines are out the door.

And the Adventure Begins!

The start of a Road Trip is such a dull affair these days. This is because I live pretty much in the middle of Texas, and have to get through the rest of it before I get to any New Territory.

This trip, at least, is exciting for Rick, who's coming with me to Wisconsin, and who has never ever been beyond Junction (except for six weeks in Basic Training on an air base in Amarillo, but he never got off base in that whole time). So we're driving along through the more or less unremarkable landscape between San Antonio and the Oklahoma line, and he found things to look at. It helps to have new things to look at, even if it's all flat, treeless expanse. And we did have a dust storm to liven things up briefly; at one point it was heavy enough to drop visibility almost to zero. But that only lasted a few hundred yards.

We left San Antonio around 8 this morning, after I dropped Homer off at his kennel. Breakfast was in Boerne, at the Bear Moon Cafe on Main Street, which until this stop has always been a favourite of mine. Today, though, I found the coffee too strong and the scones disappointing. The cranberry scone was like eating bread, with a heavy but not crunchy crust; the buttermilk scone was like eating cake. Day-old cake. 

We loaded an audiobook into the CD player and set off down the freeway. The book is P.D. James' A Taste for Death, one of her Adam Dalgliesh series. I've never read any of her work. It's by far the longest audiobook we got from the library, at 22 hours, but that's not entirely from the languid pace of the action. I find James also has a knack for elegantly simple and concise description. My favourite sentence so far, describing a character's reaction to the discovery of two bodies, was "Blood spattered against the retinas of her closed eyes." Evocative and succinct.

So in Junction we stopped to see the Deer Horn Tree. I didn't expect much of it, but that's about all there is to see in a place like Junction. Sure enough, a tree made out of deer horns. Well, we had to stop anyway, to put the top down.

Pearl of the Conchos and
Celebration Bridge

After that it was on to San Angelo. I'd been to the art museum at San Angelo a few years back, to see a travelling exhibit of paintings from some small but renowned museum in Connecticut. Right behind that museum (and I don't know if it was there at the time) is a park in the floodplain of the Concho River, and in the river, next to the new-looking Celebration Bridge, is a statue of a mermaid holding an oyster, in which is a giant pearl. The statue is called The Pearl of the Conchos. Not great art, but a nice statue in a very nice setting. Nice enough that we had a relaxing picnic lunch of the sandwiches we had brought from home.

Our next stop -- this will show you just how hard it is to find interesting things to see along the routes of western Texas -- was in Big Spring, where we were led to believe exist the world's largest pair of horns. It's only a block out of our way, so I wasn't too terribly disappointed to find that the horns are no longer there. Just an empty pavilion on the grounds of the Heritage Museum. Well, maybe they've moved the horns indoors. I suppose that if I had the world's largest horns, I'd want to protect them from the elements and rival claimants. 

The rest of the trip today, with the exception of the dust storm, was unremarkable. It's now nearly 10pm and we are ensconced in the "party room" of the Stratford Inn, in Stratford, Texas. The "party room" is called that because it has four queen-sized beds in it. I sure hope we aren't woken up in the middle of the night by a small but determined band of  Stratford's hardest-core partiers.