Boondocks Cafe on TX 36 south of Caldwell isn’t your ordinary Texas roadhouse. The little seafood restaurant resembles an eatery you might find on the back roads of Louisiana as opposed to a few hundred miles north of the Gulf of Mexico.
“We used to have to drive to Louisiana to get real seafood,” says Jesse Mendoza. “My wife, Sharon, kept after me for years to open a place of our own.” Sharon had worked in restaurants since she was 16 years old and was pretty critical of poor service and intolerant of bad food.
In August 2002, Sharon got her chance to put together her dream establishment. Gauging from the number of cars that fill the parking lot at suppertime, her ideas and menu have hit a chord with the appetite of many folks. If the Mendozas have a secret to success, Jesse says, it’s because one of the two of them is always in the kitchen. “We don’t serve anything that we wouldn’t want to eat,” he says. “We focus on being better, not bigger.”
It’s not hard to see the individual care taken on each heaping helping. The fried fish is cooked to a golden brown, yet still tender on the inside. The vegetables are fresh and done like mama used to cook ’em. The steaks are cooked to order, and the alligator doesn’t have an oily aftertaste.
“We start with fresh ingredients and cook everything from scratch,” Jesse says. “We spend a little extra time with the preparation to have a meal we can be proud to serve.”
Although Jesse spent most of the last 24 years working the oil fields around Burleson County, his upbringing was on the Texas coast. Many of the recipes came from his aunt and uncle, who fished the bays for more than 30 years. Now Jesse’s cousins supply much of the shrimp, crab, and oysters that the Boondocks Cafe serves. The alligator and frog legs come from Louisiana.
“You’d be surprised,” Jesse says about the Cajun addition to the menu. “We sell a lot of ‘gator and frog legs.” One of his repeat customers is a guy in Pennsylvania who calls in an order of alligator and frog legs every couple of months. “He brags that he has it shipped in from a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Caldwell, Texas,” Jesse says with a laugh.
Jesse says his favorite item on the menu is the Bubba Gump Special, which includes 11 pieces of fried, crab-stuffed, and boiled shrimp plus two side dishes and a big, fried onion ring on the top as a garnish. But he says the catfish is his biggest seller. The secret to good fried catfish is to keep it simple with a little seasoning and cornbread. “Keep the fillets thin,” he recommends. “That way it’s crispy on the outside and flaky on the inside.”
The Mendozas also put that kind of care into selecting the cuts of beef that they serve. “I didn’t think there was a difference between kinds of steaks,” Jesse says. “I thought it was all in the way you cooked it.” After taste-testing a variety of beef, he and Sharon decided that Angus beef was superior. “It melts in your mouth,” he says.
If the food is good country cooking, then the ambience is true Americana. The outside of the building is decorated with netting to look like a fish house, but inside it still resembles the old grocery store that it used to be. “It was a store and gas station for more than 40 years,” Jesse says.
Next door is the Fishing Hole Lounge, which serves drinks and provides pool tables for diners waiting for a table. Jesse says that his landlady had run it since 1947 as a neighborhood watering hole, until she got too old to work the bar. Now it’s an extension of the family business.
Boondocks Cafe is between Lake Somerville and Caldwell. The kitchen is open Wednesday through Friday, 4 to 10pm; Saturday, 11am to 10pm; and Sunday, 11am to 8pm. For more information, call 979/567-0211.
699th in a series. Day Trips, Vol. 2, a book of Day Trips 101-200, is available for $8.95, plus $3.05 for shipping, handling, and tax. Mail to: Day Trips, PO Box 33284, South Austin, TX 78704.
This article appears in November 5 • 2004.
