the leaning pear

Here is a new feature to my loyal readers, a restaurant review. For Valentine's day Taylor humored me and we took a trip to Wimberley. In addition to this restaurant, we also visited the Cookie Jar and Driftwood Vineyard.

We highly recommend The Leaning Pear to anyone venturing into the hill country or traveling on R.R. 12. Owned by a pair of fellow Aggies, The Leaning Pear states that they use the freshest seasonal ingredients and in our opinion, did a fantastic job of giving classic dishes a unique, memorable yet tasteful twist --pun intended.

To start, we split the Hill Country Cobb salad which, much to my pleasant surprise, was made with real, leafy greens (not iceberg), included avocado (a Cobb essential) and was mixed with an ample but not excessive amount of zesty 'southwestern ranch dressing.' Taylor "branched out" and ordered the Soup and Sandwich combo. He got the Grilled Chicken Club with avocado, provolone cheese and sundried tomato aioli on what we think was freshly in-house made grilled ciabatta bread. For the soup, he ordered a cup of one of the soup specials, Potato Curry, and said it had a nice kick at the end but wasn't too spicy. He said the soup was fantastic and that it made the meal.

I ordered Crab Cakes, another of the specials. It was a great big, single crab cake with generous (and colored) crabmeat chunks. The cake also included corn kernels and some cooked red peppers for a subtle southwest twist. Crab cakes are always served with the same type of aoili or rémoulade sauce and what sold me about this dish was that they did a pesto version of that standard sauce. Any addition of pest0 = heaven. So I was sold. Also, the breading fell apart beatuifully, indicating that it was not prebattered and then frozen. Obviously no one wants a crab cake with a McFish Fillet battering.

We arrived at 11:35am right before the crowd. It's a hoppin' little spot and, from what we could tell, with good reason.