DINING IN A TOURIST TOWN

It can be mighty hard to find good food in a tourist town.  Take San Antonio for instance.  The locals rarely ever go down to the Riverwalk, but they get a steady stream of tourists there year round.  They know they'll probably never see most of their customers again, so they aren't really aiming to lure them back over and over again with their delicious food.  All they really need is to be more appealing on the outside than any of the others around them, and not to be bad enough on the inside to make anyone sick and end up in the national news.

Wimberley is a bit unusual, in that, though we are a bit of a tourist town, we also have a whole lot of residents who moved here from places like Austin, Dallas, and Houston -- people who have reached that stage in their lives when they enjoy cooking less, and eating out more, and are accustomed to getting very good food when they do so.  People who also like to talk and blog about what they eat, so that word gets around fast.  If a restaurant here isn't good enough to attract the locals back over and over again, that's a restaurant that just isn't going to last.

So, the trick to finding good food in most tourist towns is to find out where the locals like to eat.  Which is why I'm so grateful that I have my friend Peggy to guide me whenever I venture over to Fredericksburg.  If you've been reading my other blog, Miss Becky Goes Abroad, you may have noticed her name popping up a lot lately.  She's the one who married our friend Danny, from the German ranching family in Doss, about an hour outside of Fredericksburg.  Peggy comes into town to work a couple of days per week, at a very cool shop called Remember Me Too.  If you are ever there, stop in to say hi, and tell her Becky sent you.

Anyhoo, one of the places Peggy likes to eat, whenever she's in town, is Pasta Bella, a little mom and pop run place just off of Main on Llano.  They turn out the most amazing food from their tiny galley kitchen, at very reasonable prices (lots of lunch specials for about 6.99 each).

So when my niece and sister wanted to drive over there to explore this weekend, we didn't pay six dollars just to get into the area where hordes of tourists were celebrating Oktober Fest by purchasing lots of beer and overpriced sausage on a stick.  We had a nice quiet lunch here at Pasta Bella, then wandered the streets and shops, which surprised us by actually being less crowded than usual!  We felt quite smug about it.