The Barlow Knife

Finally made it by Barlow Knife. This location seems to be a bit snakebit based on prior restaurant attempts. Menu is a bit thin, but very creative. We had sliders and the paella. The food was excellent. Staff and chef were very friendly and attentive. Similar to a couple of other reviews, they need to figure out their wine supply issues. They only serve a few wines, and were out of half of them. Not very busy on the Saturday night, so I hope they are getting enough business to survive. I will definitely be back to try more items.

We were excited to try this place since the change of owners and it wasn’t awful but it wasn’t great either. The concepts are good and the combinations are interesting but something is still a bit off in the execution. For example the brisket sliders with fried mac n cheese and potato salad could be amazing but the brisket was very tough and dry (the BBQ sauce and potato salad were really good!). I was excited about the lemon lavender bread pudding but the lavender overpowered the dish and left it tasting a bit like household cleaner. So we may try it one more time in the future to see if they e worked out the kinks but we certainly weren’t blown away.

I found it extremely irritating to be accused of posting a «suspicious» review Phil. I have spent a great deal of time at this place and I think they are doing a wonderful job, and working so very hard at it. Nothing and no one is perfect but they are knocking the ball out of the park in the brief time they’ve been open. Delighted they prevail, and hope you enjoy Trudy’s.

Today I had the pleasure of stopping by The Barlow Knife. I think overall it was an awesome place for dinner and drinks.
We enjoy finding new places in town vs. going all the way into Austin.
We enjoyed 2 very good San Antonio Margaritas on the rocks.
Had the desert = YES, ALWAYS start w/​desert!!! We enjoyed the Peppermintopia. What an awesome desert. And very becoming for the Christmas season. It was a Peppermint ice cream with hot chocolate cake — to die for.
And finally a Crab Man Do. Having lived in Baltimore where it is all about crabs, this restaurant chef made an exquisite dish of the soft shell crab. I wish I had ordered a few.
Watching all sorts of variety of sliders go by was fascinating. The dishes appeared beautiful and tasty.
The staff was awesome, checking on us and ensuring we had everything we needed.
I highly recommend making it a stop for something different.
IT IS OPEN and worth the stop!

It was ok — good wait staff but… The heralded ranch beans were basically ranch style with a dose of extra salt — ribs, while tender were over smoked — potato salad was terrific as was pineapple cole slaw

We Drippin’ residents consider ourselves generally deprived when it comes to the paltry number of eateries in this area. So. when a new place opens up, my wife and I like to check it out, in hopes we will find a new favorite local haunt.
Accordingly, we understand that any new place can have opening day/​week/​month issues as they smooth out the wrinkles, so we are usually reluctant to give thumbs down until a place gets on its feet.
That said, a recent visit to Barlow WAS sort of our second encounter. The first being when we walked in apparently on opening night, expecting to see the menu we had previously enjoyed from the last ownership (Barlow now being the SIXTH attempt to survive at this location during our 10 year residency). We were not in the mood for «sliders», and that evening there was no beer on tap, so we decided to punt without further experimentation.
But our second visit was our attempt to give a second try to this new venture. We looked online at the menu, which offered some promise, and saw that there were 2 5-​star reviews on Unilocal (on further reading of those reviews, I honestly say the wording of both very suspiciously seemed to be «manufactured», but I will let other readers be the final judge of that).
Now to the dining experience: The pleasant young waitress brought menus and a wine list, but then informed us NONE of the wines on the list were available. «What wines DO you have?». «Well, we have Chardonnay, and Fume» (Her pronunciation rhymes with Doom. hmm). Excuse me, did we wind up in a Luby’s by accident?
Not wanting to cast our fate to an unidentified house wine, we looked at the cocktail list, and decided on a Mexican Martini. Now, I won’t say my wife and I are the most sophisticated drinkers in town, but we HAVE consumed our share of margaritas and Mexican Martinis, and have come to assume that, at every other place in town, a Mexican Martini is basically a much larger version of a regular margarita, with an olive or two. Almost always it comes in its own shaker, and will consist of 2 – 3 regular cocktail glass pours. Considering the price ($ 9) was significantly higher than the margaritas, we fully expected to receive what we think is a «standard» Mexican martini.
You might imagine our surprise when the drinks arrived, in one of the smaller martini glass formats, yet only about ²⁄₃ full. Hmm. well, guess we are just wrong in our definition of this drink. Okay, to be fair, as I write this, I am revisiting the online menu, and I now see that the stated ingredients do not include the expected lime juice at all. Just olive juice. I guess we should have read the menu more carefully, and perhaps we just have uneducated palates, but it was just horrible. Honestly, the flavor was reminiscent of Pine-​Sol, but again, perhaps this will appeal to the next diner.
I ordered a Caesar Salad, since the picture on the website did look appealing. My wife order a combination of two «sliders».
My Salad was delivered, and I will say the portion was ample, and well it should be at the price (the online menu shows two prices, presumably a small and large size, but the physical menu just offered the one, higher priced option). Now, in my mind, the essential ingredient that makes a salad a «Caesar» is the dressing. It should contain garlic, as well as anchovy paste as a bare minimum, and lightly tossed in the greens. Instead, my salad came, topped with what the menu described as «Chef’s Caesar» dressing. It was a thick, pasty concoction that I can only imagine was squirted from a bottle, given the zigzag strips of dressing on top of the greens… not tossed at all. just squirted from a bottle. And, well, all I can say is if the «chef» really did prepare this dressing as his contribution to the caesar salad, I would recommend he go bury his head in the sand! I’d guess it was a close cousin to Paul Newman’s dressing, at best.
With that disappointing preface, my wife’s sliders arrived. Now, if you went to a fast food joint, or a buffet lunch, you wouldn’t expect too much of a «slider». But when you go to a place whose self-​proclaimed progeny is a «gourmet» Slider food truck, you would just naturally expect something a cut above «just-​good-​enough». Sadly, expectations don’t always materialize. What we found was 1) a thin burger patty with a bit of lettuce and tomato, between a COLD, NON-​TOASTED BUN, and 2) a piece of generic chicken with a bit of lettuce and tomato, between a COLD, NON-​TOASTED BUN. Really? A restaurant whose purported signature offering is Sliders, and that’s the best you can come up with? Honestly, it’s more than a bit embarrassing for the venue, especially a new place you would think would be pulling out all the stops to impress the diners, and definitely insulting to the diners themselves.
You can’t just charge 80% of the price of a decent full size hamburger for a tidbit, and slap some meat between a cold Costco bun.
Barlow Knife, R.I.P.

Great new menu! All scratch made and historically based foods. All natural Texas meats. Warm and friendly environment. Drinks are like nothing else around.