Hoover's Cooking

2002 Manor Rd., Austin, TX - (512) 479-5006

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Posted By Michael Stern on January 29, 2002 8:13 PM

“Our commitment is to provide good, homemade foods at a good value,” says Hoover Alexander on the front of the menu of Hoover’s Cooking, a restaurant that calls itself The Good Taste Place.

We say that Mr. Alexander makes good on his promise. His spacious restaurant is a place to go for large portions of Texas comfort food. Without flourishes or frills, but with genuine expertise born of a childhood that Alexander describes as filled with mom’s home cooking, this kitchen knows how to make hungry people happy.

We knew we were in for a bigger-than-life treat as soon as our glass of lemonade arrived. In fact, it arrived not as a glass, but as a pitcher with a straw. We had to ask if a glass would be forthcoming; our waitress told us that the pitcher IS the glass: a quart of lemonade to be drunk straight from the tankard. And it is good lemonade – sweet, fresh-squeezed, refreshing.

The choice of meals is wide. Hoover’s has its own smokehouse, perfuming the parking lot outside, from which come pork ribs, Elgin sausage, highly-spiced Jamaican jerk chicken, and lesser-spiced (but nonetheless delicious) regular-spiced barbecue chicken. In addition to the smoked fare, the menu lists chicken fried steak, meat loaf, catfish, and an array of sandwiches that range from a meatless muffaletta (made with a portobello mushroom) to half-pound hamburgers. On the side of any meal, you choose from a large selection of vegetables that include chunky mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, black-eyed peas, sweet and hammy mustard greens, crisp-fried okra, and jalapeno-accented creamed spinach. The vegetables are so good, and served in such abundance, that Hoover’s offers a three or four vegetable plate, sans meat.

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Posted By Thomas Hilbink on May 27, 2003 12:19 PM

Whether for sheer busy-ness or some coasting, my meal at Hoover's was rather disappointing. While doing research at the LBJ Library in Austin, I was overjoyed to see a Roadfood haunt as one of the closest lunch spots to the archive. I excitedly went over the first noon-time and ordered. I enjoyed the novelty of the pitcher of lemonade -- and it was tasty as advertised . My meal, was sad, however. I ordered six jerked pork ribs. The rib meat was extra fatty -- not the moist substance typically found in bbq joints. The jerk rub was spicy, but rather flat in flavor. The sides -- I ordered black-eyed peas and jalapeno creamed spinach -- were similarly flat. The beans seemed to have been dumped from can to pot with little doctoring (a fact made clear tonight when I had the same thing at Threadgill's). The creamed spinach was not spicy, just off. I can't explain it. Maybe a return trip is merited, but with many choices in Austin, this doesn't seem like the place to go. Try the BBQ across the street instead. Now that's tasty.

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