Mike Sutter review: Fig Tree’s long way back on the River Walk

The new Fig Tree, the one with the same name and same address, comes with a new owner, a new chef and new ideas on what fine dining on the River Walk looks like more than 50 years after the old one opened.

That new owner is Sam Panchevre, the man behind the burgers-and-blues institution Sam’s Burger Joint and the Aztec Theatre. And that new chef is Luis M. Colón, the man behind the late, great restaurant Folc in Olmos Park. 

I knew Folc only briefly, before it burned in 2016. And I knew Colón’s subsequent work with the scrappy Bexar Pub and the even scrappier J’Dub’s Burgers & Grub, both of which turned out some of the city’s best burgers during their brief lives. But what I didn’t know was Colón’s white tablecloth bona fides, his time at Alinea and The Publican in Chicago, his time with Bruce Auden at our own Biga on the Banks.

The new ideas at Fig Tree come from that part of Colón’s repertoire, the part that channels French technique and creativity into something that accommodates both the tourist treadmill of the River Walk and locals looking for something nicer.

What both audiences will find is a shabby-chic space hung on the bones of a two-story house built less than 20 years after the battle of the Alamo, with the kind of rococo glam of an eccentric aunt whose money goes way back but never found its way all the way back. 

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Downstairs, the floors swirl with gold epoxy. The lounge mixes Mad Men modern and blue velvet plush chairs with a white-top marble bar against a backdrop of green walls. Up a narrow flight of stairs, a gilded mirror commands a red wall facing walls of gold with antique sconces. The tables are draped in white cloth. The leather-back chairs with brass brads are scuffed at the legs, and dusty.

It’s elegant, as long as you don’t look too closely. Rough around the edges. The waitstaff’s dressed in black, formal in a way, but not so formal that it kept a floor captain from cursing out one waiter and barking table assignments to another in the dining room. 

The best food at Fig Tree smoothed out those rough edges. Perfect slices of duck dressed in sweet, aromatic oyster sauce shared a plate with oyster mushrooms dense and earthy enough to function as entrees on their own. “Butcher Steak” has a roadhouse ring to it, if that roadhouse were a Parisian steakhouse instead, trimmed in two neat cylinders seared all the way around with a blushing center, dressed with vinaigrette and onions over silky mashed potatoes.

We love to complain about salt. To the point that some kitchens are afraid of it. Not here. An expert hand knows the right shake, and salt amplified the earthiness, the tanginess, the complexity of almost everything it touched at Fig Tree, especially fresh clams with handmade agnolotti pasta. Simple, no? No. Tomato and garlic drew the clams into a tight conspiracy with the agnolotti, stuffed with sausage like a reserve battalion of flavor.

The roasted saddle of rabbit I liked so much it made the Top 25 dishes of 2022 hasn’t lost its coral-colored magic, rolled and fortified with meat from the leg, then wrapped in prosciutto with wild mushrooms and Parisian-style gnocchi like a Pop Art spin on the best chicken-and-dumplings you’ve ever had.

On ExpressNews.com: 2017 review: Time for Fig Tree to stop resting on its laurels

Fig Tree supports a full-service bar with as many drinks as there are appetizers and entrees. The wine list won’t teach you anything new, but the mule-style Fig & Ginger and the purple majesty of the Lavender Collins reimagined those two styles with flair, a flair I didn’t find with a watered-down Corduroy Jacket with Jameson and sherry nor a frothy confection called Figuratively, a drink where my $16 got lost somewhere in the foam.

At brunch, a wild-mushroom omelet with crispy potatoes suggested a kitchen that knows how to fluff an egg, with crispy potatoes that took their sidekick gig seriously. And call it biscuits and ham if you like, but Fig Tree’s version behaved more like a breakfast charcuterie flex, with blooms of prosciutto, quince paste, honey butter and biscuits in the sweet spot between fresh bread and layered pastry.

But brunch giveth and brunch taketh away, and that’s where Fig Tree’s rough edges began to migrate from the setting to the food. I like the idea of a soufflé pancake, and I’m game to gamble $24 on it, knowing the effort it takes to make a soufflé rise to the occasion. With no sides, this single pancake carried all the freighted weight of expectations. It didn’t collapse from the outside, but rather dissolved from the inside, a hollow cavern of what a forgiving soul might call cream but a less forgiving soul would just call raw in the middle.

And whatever doubts I had about filling versus undercooking on the soufflé evaporated with the globe-shaped fried waffles in a dish of rabbit and waffles when those waffles gushed batter with the touch of a fork like squeezing overripe fruit. And the fried rabbit, sectioned like chicken, was hard and dry and unyielding, fatal flaws for a rangy protein with little margin for error.

Global strife continued with foie gras beignets at dinner, a trio fried past the pillowy fluff of a beignet, filled with a liquid that flowed like chocolate milk. Blindfolded, I couldn’t have said whether it had anything to do with foie gras, or liver, or much of anything. A clever idea that couldn’t rise above clever.

Smaller complaints colored my experiences with a handful of plates. The sliced raw fluke in tangy-sweet tiger’s milk marinade chewed a degree too hard. White cheddar chicharrones turned an elegant lamb tartare into messy popcorn at the movies. And good marinated mussels with hummus were built on toast too stubborn to cut with a knife and fork, too messy to eat with the hands.

And remember the thing about perfect salting? I said “almost” because it didn’t hold true for an oversalted tilefish with the texture of chicken tenders in what seemed like a dry-rub version of sauce gribiche, even if I loved the side of Jerusalem artichoke three ways: raw, roasted and puréed.

Rough edges aside, I like this reanimated version of Fig Tree better than the old one. It’s more tuned in to its setting. There’s a station on the River Walk level selling frozen drinks to-go, and a walkup bar caters to the tables on the decks overlooking the nonstop conga line of the river. It’s strictly utilitarian, this outdoor setup, letting the dusky mayhem of the River Walk do the heavy atmospheric lifting, set to a soundtrack of country music cover songs drifting from Little Rhein Prost Haus next door.

Nice, with prices that let your date know you’re trying. Nice, but fine with your aloha shirt and sandals. Nice, with an asterisk. * River Walk nice.

msutter@express-news.net | Twitter: @fedmanwalking | Instagram: @fedmanwalking