Fry Baby & Gourdough's...

Welcome to our food blog! My name is Meaghan and, together with my buddy Rosie, we plan on trying and evaluating the many food trailers that have been popping up all over our fair city of Austin, TX. A dirty job but someone's gotta do it.

We decided not to head out with any one trailer in mind but to rather just "see where the road took us..." and, on a Sunday night, the road took us to a lot of closed trailers. So, good to know, trailers close up early (or don't open up at all) on Sundays. Also, with tomorrow being July 4th, I have a feeling that many of the trailer owners took off for an extended weekend. Good for them, it looks like it gets hot in those things and I'm sure they deserve a break.

Anyway, Rosie, my husband Sean, and myself drove around for a bit and ended up on South Congress where a large trailer food park has sprung up over the past 4 years or so. It started with Hey Cupcake! (Always a favorite!) and now is home to not only quite a few yummy trailers but also lots of people selling cool shit they made.  Rosie and I have been to this park before, she having tried the Mighty Cone and I having tried Coat and Thai (both quite good, we'll have to do a more extended review later) but we wanted to start off with somewhere brand new and so, we ended up at Fry Baby's.

Click to view the menu!

The menu consists of (you guessed it!) all fried stuff but they advertise that it's done in some kind of healthy oil so Rosie, Sean and I feel pretty OK about our choice. Rosie went for the corn dog and a sweet tea while Sean and I chose the fish and chips and soda. The service was great, very friendly and funny and the promised wait time of 10 minutes was right on the nose. The food came out SUPER hot.

We did learn a valuable lesson, though: get the drinks with the food. Sitting out in the sun in Austin waiting for food, even just for 10 minutes can make your ice cubes melt and your soda warm.

Rosie's corn dog was good, I would equate it with one that you would get up at the Dell Diamond should you choose to take in a Round Rock Express game this summer (do it! do it! do it!). She didn't enjoy her sweet tea so much but just because it was "lemon sweet" and she prefers her tea to be "crack sweet". I don't know what that means but I'm pretty sure it's not Fry Baby's fault.

The fish and chips were good by Texas standards but, being from New England, Sean and I tend to judge this category pretty harshly. The portion was kind of skimpy and I found the fish to be slightly undercooked and glassy and fishy... but again, I'm very picky when it comes to fish and chips. There's this place back in Rhode Island called Ye Olde English fish and chips... to die for. But they don't do it out of a trailer so they have an easier go of it.

After Fry Baby's and our food fried in healthy oil we decided to get some desert... trailer style. No other choice but Gourdough's on Lamar, right? It's even been featured on the food network for being one of the top 10 trailer food joints...

Gourdough's has the most amazing choices of doughnut/frosting/topping combos that you can imagine. I further risked looking like a tourist in order to get this picture of the menu in hopes that you could read some of them:

Can't see the menu? Click on it, fool!

If you can't read it, google them. It's crazy. We went for the Razzle Dazzle which is a doughnut with chocolate fudge icing, raspberry jam and chocolate chips. We decided to share one between the 3 of us since they probably contain more sugar than anyone one person needs in a week. I ordered our doughnut with 3 waters and a scoop of ice cream.

Now, Gourdoughs makes their doughnuts to order so I wasn't concerned when I was told it would be about 30 minutes. I was disappointed, however, when they let us know they were 1) out of water and 2) out of ice cream. These doughnuts are MADE for ice cream and require water in order to wash down the intense gooey-ness. Seriously, send someone to the store. Especially when the majority of the people waiting for doughnuts end up crossing Lamar to go to the gas station to get water. It's just a lawsuit waiting to happen, people!

Anyway, Sean, Rosie and I decided to get our Razzle Dazzle to go so that we could pick up some ice cream at CVS and get our own god damn water out of the faucet the way that God intended. Over an hour later, we got our doughnut. Now, I'm sure that the Gourdough's staff was working as hard as they could in their super hot little trailer and I'm not going to be like the jerk that asked "really? don't you just dunk it and serve it? what's so hard?". But if it's going to be an hour, please just say that up front because then I will say "yeah, they're good, but not waiting in the sun for an hour good".

But they sure are waiting in the sun 30 minutes good.