Press Café
Felipe Armenta built a glass box on the Trinity hike-and-bike trail and named it for pressed sandwiches and French press coffee. Texas Monthly's Patricia Sharpe went three months in and picked the market fish over the steak.
Why go
Armenta opened this on 7 January 2016 on old Edwards Ranch land, and Sharpe went for dinner while it was still new.1 She describes the setting first and the reason is plain: Gazing across an open field at strings of lights glowing amid the trees, watching stars wink on one by one in the darkening sky, it's easy to imagine that Press Cafe is farther from civilization than it really is.
Downtown Fort Worth is five miles off.1 The ranch under it was Lemuel J. Edwards's, granted in 1848 and grown past seven thousand acres before the land started being worth more than the cattle.1 Armenta had not planned for the crowds. He told Sharpe he wanted a modest place on the trail, and then things went gangbusters.
1
Order this / avoid
- Order: the market fish. Sharpe, in 2016:
it was good quality and perfectly sautéed, with simple salt and pepper setting off rosy-pink flesh.
1 - Order: the sliced New York strip,
lightly charred on the outside and deliciously laced with well-rendered fat,
with colcannon potatoes under it.1 - Order: the heirloom vegetable salad, which Sharpe describes as
a carnival of sweetly dressed avocado, pears, peas, purple potatoes, pistachios, chopped radicchio, and Port Salut cheese.
1 - Avoid: the cakes. Sharpe:
when I tasted the two artless cakes, I wondered if they'd come from a bake sale.
The peanut butter cookie was her pick instead.1
What locals & experts say
- Texas Monthly, Patricia Sharpe, 2016:
But the best dish of the evening was the market fish. Although neither the price nor description suggested that our salmon was wild, it was good quality and perfectly sautéed, with simple salt and pepper setting off rosy-pink flesh.
1 - Felipe Armenta, chef-owner, on how he learned to eat out:
When I lived in New York, I would go to work at five a.m., get off at six, go home and change, and then a buddy and I would hit two or three restaurants a night.
1
Good to know
- The review has a year on it. Sharpe ate here in 2016, when the cafe was three months old, and the dishes above are hers from that visit.
- There are two doors. The saved pin and Sharpe's review are the Fort Worth one on Edwards Ranch Road; the other is in Aledo.3
- It trades seven days, from breakfast through to the evening, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday.2
- The kitchen has changed hands since the review. Efrain Cruz is chef de cuisine now.2
Verdict
could-visit — Patricia Sharpe reviewed it for Texas Monthly and picked the market fish over the steak, which is a real call and the strongest thing standing behind this door. She made it in 2016 on a three-month-old kitchen and nobody has published a verdict since, so order the market fish on her word and leave the cakes she disliked. What holds up regardless is the setting she describes, a glass building on the Trinity hike-and-bike trail with a fire pit, and Armenta's group has kept it running for a decade.