Welfare, Texas
In mid-October I made a brief escape to the Hill Country and one of my accidental discoveries was the Welfare Cafe in Welfare, Texas.
Welfare shows up on enough maps and highway signs that I'd always assumed it was some sort of sister city to Comfort, the famous colony of German Freethinkers (and present B&B town in the Greater Fredericksburg Frou-Frou Zone). But I'd taken the Welfare exit off of I-10 a couple of times and never been able to find the place. I'm still unclear on whether it was a Freethinker town, but the point seems moot as Welfare's Handbook of Texas entry says its population peaked at 275 in 1892 and dropped to 25 by the 1920s. That's why my previous attempts to find Welfare had failed, because I was expecting a recognizable town and drove right by it. This time, though, I stopped in the relative metropolis of Waring (pop.73) to ask about a good place to eat and was told that the small wooden building I had passed by was the last remnant of Welfare, the Welfare Cafe.
But what a remnant! Because the Welfare Cafe has what I'd looked for without success in Fredericksburg and other Hill Country towns: good German-inspired cooking. The Cafe offers six kinds of Schnitzel and a dozen other continental entrees, and Spätzle among the side dishes! With maybe eight tables, a decor that evokes its old country-store origins but manages to stay just short of Death by Kitsch, and a lovely garden of native plants out back. The Cafe would be worth its own trip from San Antonio or a detour from any Hill Country excursion out of Austin.
There's a menu on the Cafe's website (don't be put off by its amateur design). Mapquest has a map but here are directions: on I-10 between Boerne and Comfort, take the Waring/Welfare exit. Pass the Po-Po Family Restaurant -- itself not a bad place for old-fashioned Texas cooking -- and head north about three miles on Waring-Welfare Road. Try not to run into livestock as you watch for the Cafe on your right. If you get to Waring, turn around and try again.
(P.S. for my fellow language nerds: Every historical sketch of Welfare, even those which should be well researched like the one in the Handbook of Texas, seems to claim that its original German name Wohlfahrt meant "pleasant journey". Well, according to my Cassell's (where in the heck did I lose my Wahrig?!), Wohlfahrt has nothing to do with gute Fahrt. It means precisely "welfare", both in the classic sense of "well-being" or "common good" and in the more recent bureaucratic sense of public assistance or the dole. Sounds like someone was a little insecure about the semantic drift of the town's name.)