On the way back I stopped by my favorite place to eat in all of Austin, the 1886 Cafe and Bakery. I had the burger, which I’d never had before, and their dessert of the month, peach dewberry crumble cake.

This is basically a small pie crust with almond in it, kind of glazed on the outside, filled with dewberry filling and cubes of peaches, and covered with sweet oat crumble. All this is sliced into half-moons and layed on the plate touching at one side and split at the other, with a ball of vanilla ice cream laid in the middle. A signature “confection bridge”, in this case a small roll of white chocolate, spans the two. A little bit of caramel is zigzagged artfully across the plate and dewberry halves ring the perimeter to complete the package.

Actually, they were out of vanilla, so I had strawberry. I think it was even better. All this bakery love for $5, served up by a friendly, beautiful girl named Christina. You can’t ask for more than that.

About a week ago Paul took me to the 1886 for diagnosing the problem with his car. I had the turkey BLT, which is a BLT on a croissant roll, except with a goodly pile of sliced turkey on it to boot. It’s dressed with chipotle mayonaisse. It’s hella HELLA good. You can probably get a sandwich like that for less than $10, but it would suck and you’d be a cheap bastard. For dessert I had the chocolate caramel mousse cake, which is a mall round cake where the bottom half is cake and the top half is mousse. It’s served, like all 1886 desserts, with a small scoop of raspberry sorbet that manages to be incredibly tart without crossing that fine line into sourland. The confection bridging the two in this case is a thin (think bottom-of-a-double-boiler) wedge of dark chocolate splattered on one side with what appears to be gold gild. Frickin’ awesome, man.

They’re hiring. It’s too bad I couldn’t afford to work there even if I could get hired.