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To understand the motley glories of Tex-Mex cooking, order The Deluxe Mexican Dinner plate at Garcia’s in San Antonio. Crammed onto an oval platter: two cheese enchiladas and a pork tamale buried in chili con carne and melty webs of yellow cheese; a freshly fried crispy taco stuffed with ground beef, shredded iceberg lettuce, and diced tomato; fluffy rice tinted auburn-blond by tomato paste; and a magma pool of refried beans creamy with lard and bacon fat. I’ve had dozens of combination plates like this one over the years, but few have nailed each element of the plate with such finesse — a word, I know, not often associated with a cuisine too often considered cheap and inauthentic. But Tex-Mex is way more nuanced than a blanket stereotype, and eating at Garcia’s is one insightful, gratifying introduction to eating in San Antonio. A different sort of combo platter served four miles away at Cured makes an equally brilliant first impression for the city: Chef-owner Steve McHugh lays out a spread of nine masterfully crafted charcuterie selections. He ages pork and duck hams and salumi like cotechino in a glassed-in locker prominent at the restaurant's entrance, and his kitchen assembles beauties such as lamb and citrus terrine and jars of apple-jalapeño-pork rillettes dolloped with apple-ginger jam. Every preparation has a finely tuned texture that, as much as the individual flavors, keeps the whole from blurring into a muddle of cold prepared meats. In step with national trends, the on-point charcuterie program also speaks to the sophistication and energy in San Antonio's accelerating dining culture. Beyond pâtés and sausages, Cured's menu runs eclectic. Lunch includes New Orleans-style barbecued shrimp with a calibrated Worcestershire twang and a righteous burger with bacon ground into the beef and a halo of house-made beer cheese. Dinner brings fall pleasures like fennel and persimmon salad and local quail over creamed grits with slivers of fermented apple. With a sharp service staff and a dining room evocative with old brick and reclaimed woods, McHugh's modern American restaurant (which opened in 2013) is a place that I could envision succeeding in most any city around the country. I had my favorite meals in San Antonio at Garcia's and Cured, and together they represent the extremes of a city that, in terms of food, struck me as having two unusually distinct — and divided — personalities. There is Tex-Mex, the entrenched regional cuisine that is as emblematic to San Antonio as the Alamo. And then there are the city's accomplished chefs and ambitious restaurateurs, taking cues from coast-to-coast trends (while sometimes following their own muses). The two ends of the spectrum are only beginning to meet in the middle; dining furiously through town for four days felt like a constant leap between parallel worlds. In can be surprising to learn that San Antonio is the second largest city in Texas and the seventh largest in the country. (The city has comparatively sprawling borders, but still: It counts 1.4 million among its population.) For an urban area of its size, it has long maintained a relatively low profile, particularly when compared to the more attention-grabbing cities within the "Texas Triangle" mega-region: Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, and Houston. In the last decade, the city began touting its strengths: economic stability, a growing tech sector, a revitalization of downtown and surrounding communities. San Antonio's national profile is on the rise. San Antonio is on the cusp of breakout status, but from my vantage the food scene doesn't quite yet have its defining direction In the dining community, I could feel the competitive spirit rippling through the new restaurants. San Antonio faces intense interstate competition from higher-profile cities with cutthroat dining scenes: Houston has the astounding diversity, Dallas has the money and moxie, and Austin has the limitless cool factor. San Antonio is on the cusp of breakout status, but from my vantage the burgeoning food scene doesn't quite yet have its defining direction or its meteoric chef, a la Sean Brock in Charleston, with an entirely fresh perspective that uplifts the entire community. San Antonio's most visible restaurant project is the Pearl district, a booming 16-block development built up around the former Pearl Brewery. The area has become the city's nerve center of fashionable dining and is, if anything, under-hyped. Among shops and offices and a yoga studio, its twenty acres is also home to nearly a dozen food-minded businesses, including a bakery and a third-wave coffee shop, a year-round Saturday farmers market, and the Culinary Institute of America's third campus (after New York and northern California), which last year began offering a 15-week Latin Cuisines concentration as part of its curriculum. The complex has received well-deserved praise, but if it were in, say, national media darling Austin, it would be spotlit in one magazine after another. For standup meals, consider breakfast or dinner at Osteria Il Sogno, run by lauded veteran chef Andrew Weismann; a crunchy chicken-fried steak alongside an IPA or Belgian wheat brewed onsite at sprawling Southerleigh, which just launched in April; or perhaps a lunchtime chopped beef barbecue sandwich at The Granary, which serves more elaborate plates like beef clod with tomato caramel and pickled celery at dinner. (The mention of chopped beef makes this a good place to note that barbecue is not generally San Antonio's forte. Happily, the legendary barbecue towns of Luling and Lockhart are both only an hour's drive away.) The revival of the city's central core extends far beyond the Pearl. Goan pickled shrimp and pastrami-style brisket over beer-braised cabbage and rye bread impressed at Feast in the buzzy Southtown community less than a mile from downtown. Appetizers like gumbo and fried boudin balls stood out most at Louisiana-minded Cookhouse, one of the town's hottest draws. The highest profile restaurant in this mix is Hot Joy, a new-wave Asian trendsetter that pulled in national praise when it opened last year. My experience, however, was lukewarm. I could tell I dropped in on an off night. Some of the bar staff had just transferred from another restaurant that the owners were closing and seemed nervous to even hand us menus. The crab fat caramel wings reminded me happily of Pok Pok's sticky wonders; a mashup of gumbo and tsukemen (a sort of deconstructed ramen presentation where broth and noodles are served separately) sounded intriguing but came off muddy and flat. Loved the Hong-Kong-out-of-midcentury-cinema atmosphere, all crimson lighting and Chinese tchotchkes.
