Brunch at Oria
A birthday, a patio, and the best bread in 78704
By Greg Cooper, Kuper Sotheby’s International Realty
There’s an oven on the patio at Oria, out in the open where you can watch it work, and it is the reason this review exists.
We went for my daughter’s birthday brunch. I’d like to claim some deep research went into the pick, but the truth is we wanted somewhere pretty, somewhere close, and somewhere that wouldn’t rush a table of people who intended to sit for two hours. Oria delivered on all three and then kept going.
The wood-fired sourdough pita arrives first because it has to. It comes off that oven puffed up and blistered and steaming, and there is a small window where it is perfect — a window our table respected by eating all of it immediately and ordering more. Get it with the hummus, which is smooth and generous and disappears in roughly the same fashion.
The sleeper of the meal was the morning potatoes. Nobody photographs the potatoes. Everybody finishes the potatoes.
The girls went with eggs Benedict and the burger, both of which vanished fast enough that I began to suspect I’d ordered wrong. I hadn’t — I had the lamb skewers, straight off the fire, and I’d order them again tomorrow.
What struck me beyond the food was how it all looked coming out of the kitchen. Someone back there cares about plating, and it shows without tipping into fussy. Nothing arrived looking like it had been assembled with tweezers, but nothing arrived looking careless either.
And the service. I want to dwell on this, because it’s the part restaurants can’t fake and the part that actually makes a birthday. Our table was warm, attended to, and completely unhurried from the first pita to the last coffee. Nobody hovered, nobody vanished, and nobody made us feel like they wanted the table back. On a celebration, that’s worth more than any single dish.
The setting earns its keep too. Oria calls itself a Mediterranean secret garden, which is a big swing for Barton Springs Road, but the patio mostly pulls it off — olive trees, a fountain, vine-covered pergolas, and that pita oven going the whole time. Longtime Austinites will recognize the bones of the place: it’s the old Austin Eastciders space, reborn in limewash and ivy. Barton Springs Road keeps reinventing itself, and this is one of the better reinventions.
Here’s my summary: it’s a genuinely lovely way to spend a weekend morning, it made a birthday feel like an occasion, and I’ve already caught myself thinking about that pita on a Tuesday.
Oria — 1530 Barton Springs Rd. Brunch Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Free garage parking behind the building, which on Barton Springs Road counts as a genuine act of hospitality. Reservations on Resy.
— Greg Cooper, Kuper Sotheby’s International Realty
Sources
• Oria