De Wese's Tip Top Cafe's Onion Rings

I love really old restaurants that have survived through the decades!  Tip Top Cafe in San Antonio is one of them. 

It's as authentic as an old time diner can come.  Everyone is super friendly as soon as you walk in the door.  You can sit anywhere and service is pretty quick!  The menu boasts that they have "award winning onion rings." So, how do those onion rings measure up to the hype created by Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives?

 As soon as the server came to take our order, she asked, "Would you like to start with some onion rings?" 
     "Yes, actually. . . yes, we would!"  In fact, pretty much every table we saw had their own stack of these gorgeous babies sitting there smiling at us.

 It looks like an awful lot of huge onion rings, doesn't it?  But my family loved them so much they were gone before our server could even bring out all of our sauces.  We just ate them all with the jalapeno ranch. We never really end up fighting over onion rings, but we kind of did over these. 

The breading is flaky and tender- but with a perfect crispness to hold up against those giant sweet onions.  To me there was just a hint of fishyness to them, though.  This would have maybe come from the oil being shared with fried fish at the restaurant or other meats.  Most people would not notice this, or maybe consider it as enhancing the fried flavor, but I tend to be a bit more of a super taster so it bothered me.  

Overall they are superb specimens of the onion ring world.  It is difficult to nail perfectly cooking these type to this golden hue.

The above child ate way more than his share.  The child below was obsessed with the technology of the at-table jukeboxes which fed into a larger music machine in the room.  Someone must have selected a TON of songs before we chose ours so we actually never got to hear the song that we paid our 50 cents for!

If you really can't get enough of the batter that the onion rings are in, they also use it on the delicious chicken fried chicken that they serve on Saturdays and their every day gigantic chicken fried steak. 

Maybe they also use it on their fried fish. . .