Two restaurants: one new, one new to us

We visited two new eating places this weekend -- one we liked a lot, one not so much.

Saturday night we pulled out one of those coupon ad-mags to seek out a good deal at a new restaurant. We chose Andrew's in Bartonville/Lantana, which occupies the same slot on 407 that our one-time favorite Mudd's used to fill. Andrew's is brand new, and promises home-cooking and steaks, which is some of the same turf Mudd's used to cover.

Mudd's used to have a pretty down-home feel, considering it was built into a fancy collection of shops. It had an open-kitchen, hard concrete floors, and a very casual feel. Andrew's has closed the kitchen off from view, and tried to add a few more upscale features into the decor, but it's only a modest upgrade.

The big difference is in the menu. Mudd's focused on 10 or 12 different entrees (chicken-fried this and that, and steaks, and this great thick pork chop). On the other hand, reading the menu at Andrew's is like reading the phone book. They have a wide variety of dishes, but the print on the menu is very small and blends in too easily with the color of the paper it's printed on.

Mudd's focus on just a few signature dishes helped it set a standard of quality for those dishes. The food at Andrew's was fine -- we enjoyed all our meals. But the attention to detail and quality and that sense of freshness just wasn't there. The food just didn't stand out as anything special.

Service was friendly and generally attentive but not very polished. Servers were mostly teens.

It's a relatively-long hike for a southside Flower Mound to drive to Bartonville, and we have to pass a lot of good Flower Mound restaurants to get there. I doubt we'll make a special effort to go to Andrew's again, but if we're invited there with friends, we'll look forward to a return visit. If we lived in Lantana, we'd add it to our "occasional" list of restaurant choices.

The next day we checked out Nick-N-Willy's they-make-it, you-bake-it pizza place (FM2499 and FM407, near Lowe's). It's been around a year or more, I guess, but we've not visited it before. I love pizza, and I can easily do a top-ten list of the best pizza shops in town. I also enjoy making it from scratch, including the dough. Because we have so many good pizza places, I didn't think I'd have any need for a place where you take away a cold pizza, then do all the baking yourself.

We visited Nick-N-Willy's on Sunday afternoon, after church and after a quick trip to Lowe's. I thought we'd get home to watch football sooner if we tried this take-away pizza, but I wasn't expecting much from the experience. Instead, I enjoyed watching the boys behind the counter prepare the ingredients for the pizzas they were preparing for us. They gave us the fresh pies on platters, and then before I left the store, they went over the heating directions to make sure I'd cook them properly.

We brought home the three pizzas, cooked them separately (thanks to two ovens, this went quickly), served them hot at home. All three pizzas came out perfectly, and the kids thought they were great. My wife and I were both impressed too. They tasted fresh, and they tasted really good.

Nick and Willy, we'll be back, even if we don't have to rush home to watch football. By the way, there is nominal table seating in the restaurant, and I bet they'll even bake your pizza (not just make it) for no extra charge!