Con-Fusion: Mars and the Battle for the South Side

Austin is a beautiful city - and I mean that in more than a superficial way. It isn't pretty. Victoria, BC is pretty; Portland, OR is pretty; San Francisco is the prototype of the pretty city. Austin is something else. It's grittier, it's scruffier, it's dustier and more bent. If San Francisco had a them song, it would probably be, well, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," the Mel Torme' version, foggy and velvety. If Austin had a theme song, there would be plenty of popular sentiment behind the work of Willie and Stevie Ray (the natural candidates), but more to my own liking would be John Prine - something like "Sour Grapes," sort of country, sort of down home and more than half blues. And beautiful for these very qualities. Not pretty or smooth or polished or sweet; just beautiful - kind of hard and kind of ironic and humorous at the same time.

It is changing, however, as all cities do, and one doesn't have to look far to see evidence of this. Bars with live sharks swimming under the dance floor are indication of how close we may be, without knowing it, to moral and spiritual death, not to mention aesthetic bankruptcy. A more subtle indication is the proliferation of 'theme' restaurants, by which I don't mean medieval knights errant splashing gore and mud into your roasted venison haunch while bawdy wenches dawdle in the reek (there is something to be said for these places, but that something belongs in an anthropology textbook more than a food blog). Rather, I am referring to restaurants that envision themselves in accordance with what some blunt-minded entrepreneur perceives to be an 'aesthetic,' and then fling that aesthetic like Pollock on roids all over everything, from the bathroom sinks to the designer drinks. These restaurants aren't McSpensives insofar as they reach a little farther for character and generally aren't chains, but they are silly in their own special ways - and it's my job to point these ways out.

My wife Caroline and I had our first night out together since the arrival of little Elias to our lives (a boy-child, in case you were wondering) two nights ago. Because we were leaving the bruiser with his grandmother at the Hotel San Jose, and needed, as all first-time parents struggling with shell-shock, sleep-deprivation, paranoia and acute inferiority complexes would, to furtively stay in the neighborhood, we went to Mars - a half block up and on the same side of the street as the hotel. We should have crossed the street.

Mars is a fusion restaurant. I feel obligated to point out the irony of the fact that, other than in our own southwest desert, we've only ever detonated nuclear devices in Asia and the Pacific Islands; when we talk of fusion cuisine, we refer to a fusing of Pacific Rim techniques and spicing with European and American ingredients. But not a nuclear fusing - no, that would result in a cataclysmic explosion, and might even be a little off-color. Couldn't they have called it Melding Cuisine? Combinatory? Swapping? How about Swinging Cuisine? Anything else for christ's sake.

Strike one. Okay, it's not really Mars's fault that it's called that, but do you think I'd bother to point it out if there weren't other strikes coming? How about this one: Tuna Tataki: Seared rare tuna with Meyer lemon oil, black sesame dust and daikon radish sprouts. Sounds good? It hardly tastes as good as the paper it's printed on. This was my unfortunate wife's first course - allow me to translate: second-rate tuna in a sauce that we made up without actually tasting it! This is the only conceivable excuse for the bland travesty of this dish. Here's another one: Rice Paper Wrapped Prawns with green papaya slaw. Unpretentious enough, so how could they misrepresent? In pluralizing - cuz there was one prawn, split in two. Okay, maybe this is splitting prawns on my part, but again, there seemed to be a step missing in the creation of this dish, ie, actually tasting it. The first part of the first bite, after dipping the appetizer in the accompanying vinegar and soy sauce side, was yummy - because I was tasting the side. After two or three chews, I was tasting the thing itself, and as with the Tuna Tataki, I was left with a mouthful of bland. What was happening here?

Of course, what was happening was what I said before - that we should have crossed the damn street. In truth, we had been to Mars before - and had the same experience. Corroboration, however, is necessary before one makes categorical condemnations (see Iraq and WMDs...oh no, there I go shooting off my mouth again). The potstickers, the spring rolls, yup, even the hummous and baba ganough - all serve up the same cardboard after a rain storm panache.

But there's more! Okay - this should be enough, right? No - there are a couple of other strikes (what is that, like, nine at this point?). The ribs. Oh, The Baby Back Ribs. Everyone in the restaurant business knows that there is only one way to do ribs properly, and that's long, slow, dry heat; you liquefy the connective tissue, you baste the meat in the slowly reducing fat, you intensify the flavors while at the same time tenderizing the flesh to just the sexiest thing outside of, well, actual sex you can achieve. Everyone in the restaurant business also knows there is a short-cut, and that's par-boiling. You put the ribs in water, cook 'em for a while, then finish them on the barbecue or in the oven. The one problem with this shortcut is that it ruins the ribs, boils all of the flavor right out of them leaving them plastic-tasting and gray. Guess who boils their ribs? But it saves a few hours, and as long as the rest of the menu tastes like, um, a menu, why should it be an issue?

Last strike (promise, cross my heart) - Grilled Beef Tenderloin with soy mushroom reduction. Let's start at the language level. Soy mushroom reduction - what kind of soy? Beans? Paste? Fermented? Fresh? There are no less than 20 things that, having been brought up in a Chinese household, the unqualified term 'soy' brings to my mind - and that's just food. But, of course, in this case it refers to soy sauce - the only soy to the fusion-minded chefs at Mars. Which points toward an underlying ignorance of the cuisine to which these gentle folk are fusing - an ignorance that is further demonstrated in the reduction itself. In Chinese cooking, as in all Asian cooking, there is a basic dictum that, unless you've already got a base of a bunch of other liquid, you do not expose soy sauce to direct heat. To the Chinese, this is not reduced soy sauce, or simmered, or de-glazed; it's burnt. Soy sauce has a very low tolerance to heat, and when it burns, it smells and tastes like a salted sneaker. Go to your neighborhood hippie stir-fry joint and take a big sniff. Smell that? It's soy sauce being thrown directly on a hot wok. Same at Mars - you can smell it ten yards away.

Maybe I'm giving you the wrong impression; I am most definitely not a purist, not in my food, not in my friends, not in my politics or religion. I am a mixer and a mixture; Chinese, Portugese, Anglo, maybe even a little French or Italian somewhere back there, all by way of New Jersey, Iran, The Hague and just about everywhere else. I like this about myself and my country. Mutual interest and respect, however, are the key here. Mars shows little respect for its influences, its food and ultimately for its customers. It's theme-y, it's cost-y, it's got a great location and it has taken these elements as permission to forget that it is a restaurant, that it serves food and that - and here's where I get pissed - people eat it. We deserve better than this.

Mars is the encroachment of pretty into a beautiful South Austin; it's the supplanting of beauty as defined by places like Polvos, Torchys and Enoteca with fancy language and sleek surfaces. Meyer lemon oil indeed; they wouldn't know a Meyer lemon if it slept on their couch and drank all their beer. If it were up to Mars, Austin's theme song would be something by Kenny G - remember him? - and it wouldn't matter what. Anything - it's all the same anyway, right?

The Other Side of McSpensive: Fino and the Yuppy Effect

Yuppies. The word is so past its prime now that we often forget that, in fact, it once referred to people - a whole bunch of them. Blandly barbered, Armani and Canali suited, erect-backed, Nautilus fit, wide-smiling cretins whose credit limits overwhelmed their imaginations, in the Eighties these were the new barbarians, salaried urban professionals with JDs and MBAs whose manifesto was the simple, primitive, Reaganomical dictum, "make it and spend it." They were supply side gone bonkers, the final death knell to the post-Depression era generation, to the save-until-you-die conservatives for whom the possibility of soup lines and wheelbarrow loads of cash for a loaf of bread was still a living, snarling memory.

Well, folks, I hate to tell you but we're back there again, and I don't mean the Eighties. Staring down the barrel of a financial infrastructure collapse, we begin to wonder if the esprit of the Yuppy wasn't, in fact, a bit more insidious than we might first have thought, that it wasn't just an 'I'm gonna get mine while it's hot,' kind of thing, but that it might have been an 'I'm gonna get yours and yours and yours, too - oh, and maybe yours as well, as long as you're not paying too close attention.' Okay, okay - maybe the Yuppy wasn't really the driver (Republicans - oops, did I say that out loud?), or even the mule team (more Repub...oh no - almost did it again), but the Yuppy was definitely on the cart, enjoying the ride, urging the beasts on.

But were they all bad? This is the question that I will pose with this column - and answer, if I'm worth my herb infused, alder-smoked black lava salt. While the Eighties are more often associated with MTV, pegged jeans (they're baaaack...), upturned Polo shirt collars and Andrew McCarthy (where did he end up anyway? and why were chicks so into him? wasn't he a little creepy?), there were other things that came out of it. For my purposes, the Eighties saw a renaissance in American dining. Tuscan restaurants were the first real wave, introducing cream sauces, porcini, reggiano and pesto to the New Worlder's palate. And lo and behold, the Americans discovered that food eaten out could taste like something other than salt and butter (not that I have anything against salt and butter, but there are other things that your philosophy should be dreaming of, Horatio). Suddenly we had tapas joints, pho stands and churrascarrias popping up across the land.

And why? (At last, we come to his thesis - Jesus, did he fail rhetoric and composition?) The Yuppy - and here I make my stand. It's not that, previous to the rise of this species we didn't have the chefs; there are always chefs around, people for whom a good meal is a grail, the quest for which is never-ending. It's that, in order for a restaurant culture to come into being, there have to be people who are willing to pay, and if, as we posited previously, there was one thing Yuppies were willing to do, it was pay.

Fino is exemplary of the kind of restaurant that Yuppies made possible. Low light, minimal design, a good sized wine list, a menu that changes regularly, and all in a medium expensive price range. While it is my belief that the fundament of a good eating town is in the cheap joints (Austin is fertile), these middle-ground places are the flourishing of the garden. Fino gives jobs to people who love making and serving good food.

Fino is a hybrid of several kinds: it offers tapas and entrees; it mixes elements of Spanish, North African and Italian cuisines; it is upscale and at the same time amused without being offended by my occasional Spooner surfer wear; it welcomes the post cotillion old-Texas freakazoids, frumpy university bookworms, hipster 'mos, rock n' roll session musicians and young couples out for a romantic evening. Brown people frequent the place - and work there, and not just in the kitchen but in the front of the house as well (which, as one of them myself, is a welcome deviation from the norm).

And then there's the food, which is the point. Start with the coca flatbread - whatever the preparation du jour is. Every time I've been, it's included jamon Serrano with a fresh egg cracked on top, sometimes with herbs, sometimes with truffle oil, consistently delicate, rich, aromatic and utterly satisfying. Don't miss the quail (words to live by, no?) - again, whatever the presentation, be it as a tapa with chorizo and croutons, or as an pasta entree with angel hair in a muscular tomato sauce. And chew those bones people - that's why they are there. Boneless is for the toothless and tasteless.

The anchovy-stuffed fried olives are nuggets of goodness, and the pinchitos (small skewers of marinated pork served with a sprinkle of rock salt) are so good you'll want two orders - at least. The salads are, well, they're there, it seems, more because some people want salads than because they are particularly respected. So be it - eat your greens at home. Instead, try the tagine, a French African clay pot stew that, at Fino, consists of pearl pasta, chicken and aromatic vegetables; gentle, perfumey and subtle; my friend David (of the Long Lunch) wanted more spice but I was very, very happy with it. My only reservation is with the paella, and this is not exclusive to Fino. Paella should be eaten outside under a trellis with the surviving relatives of the chickens, rabbit and shellfish that are in the dish scratching, hopping and siphoning about nearby. I've not had a restaurant paella that did the form justice, and Fino has not changed that circumstance.

In the coming crash - and it is coming, if not already here - we will prove to ourselves what we've actually learned and what we've just been pretending at. Will we be able to discern the restaurants worth having around from those that should never have come into being in the first place? When our money becomes more scarce and we become more prudent about spending it, what will be our choice? This question is nothing less than one of our quality as a culture. Do we want something that tastes good, is prepared with care and served by people who appreciate it, or do we want crap served by folks who know it's crap but are earning their money by convincing you that you're Frank Sinatra (see Meditations of the Evil of Banality: The McSpensive Restaurant)? Maybe Yuppies have driven our economy into the ground, but hey, when life gives you sour milk, make really good cheese. This is our chance to put the McSpensives out of business. Let's make Robbespierre proud.

Having cut my adult teeth with 15 years spent in Portland, OR - in my opinion the best eating town per capita in the country, with no close contenders - working in restaurants, eating in them, and hanging out with people who also worked in them, I participated in the process of a city acquiring an appetite for carefully prepared, diverse food. Fino is feeding this burgeoning desire here in Austin, and we're lucky to have them. Give them love (and money) folks, and let's keep them around through the lean times; they're worth it.

South Austin Soul Food - Polvos (for Caroline)

As a writer, I find my reasons for writing as various as a cowboy finds reasons for riding a horse, or a drunk finds reasons for drinking, or a holy roller finds reasons for praying. Today, I am sitting in the Atrium Cafe in the St. David's Medical Center (it's a hospital, just for those of you who, like me, are intolerant of clunky euphemisms) while my wife is asleep in a room upstairs. She's been in labor for nearly 24 hours now - an experience that, for those of us who haven't witnessed or undergone it and therefore might have some difficulty appreciating it, is like taking a very, very hard hit from Lawrence Taylor in excruciatingly slow motion; a 24-hour-and-counting tackle. It is to Caroline and her indomitable strength that I dedicate this column.

You can't come to Austin and not eat Tex-Mex - this is so basic that it's gospel. Last September, after a 12 hour day which was the fifth such day in our drive from Oregon (we took a somewhat circuitous route, which is why it took us nearly 60 hours), my wife and I arrived back in Austin ragged, road-weary and generally uninterested, unwilling and we thought unable to stand another minute, another second, another nanosecond in our car. We were stuck in a lousy hotel out on 290 where the carpet smelled like chemicals and the bedspread looked like it had been polished with turtle wax. We needed sleep and we needed food, and while it seemed like getting back into the car was the very last thing of which, in our attenuated state, we were capable, the thought of Polvos was like a shot of pitocin to our travel-weary muscles. We couldn't agree on who got what side of the bed, the cable control, or to piss first, what got brought in from the car and by whom, whether the dog should be brought or left, whether we should, in truth, have come to Austin in the first place, whether we loved each other any more, whether the sky was up and the economy down, but there was no discussion here: first thing, no question, go eat at Polvos. Gimme some of that queso.

Polvos sits on South First St., a busy thoroughfare that divides Soco from the Bouldin Creek neighborhood. A large, shaded verandah looks over, well, a parking lot. Many of the tables are plastic topped, the chairs folding, the music wildly variable. Nothing about this place is precious - except the food. Which isn't to say it's mincey and delicate, dollops, shavings and sprinkles. This is hearty fare, but prepared with care and that oh-so-often missing ingredient in restaurants (so often that we sometimes forget to look for it): a love of food. Maybe it's pretty, pricey, organic, free-range or trendy, but if the cooks or chefs don't love the taste of food, it shows like sleaze on a used car salesman.

Let's start with the basics - at Polvos: magaritas, chips and queso. The chips are good and fresh, unsalted so you can eat them how you like, a perfectly benign vehicle. The queso is delicious. For those of you not in or from Texas, who have never had queso, think somewhere in a populist middle ground between cheese fondue and the stuff you spray on Ritz crackers. Queso is a soupy, goopy bowl of beer laden cheesy goodness served with a pile of sauteed beef crumbles, cilantro, jalapenos and onions that you add to taste. We always add it all, give it a good stir and gobble it down.

Then there are the margaritas. The margarita is a Texas invention, and it's as simple as pie: lime juice, sugar, triple sec and tequila, stir or, if you want it frozen, blend and you've got a recipe for a great night and bad morning. The margs at Polvos are three things that they need to be: limey, large and strong. The way to fuck up a margarita is to use lime extract, Rose's lime juice, reconstituted lime juice or any other substitute for the real thing (including all mixes). Polvos does not, and the proof is in the flavor. Real lime juice has a perfume and subtle sweetness that neither overwhelms nor leaves intact the desert herby taste of the tequila. In a renaissance age of the mixed drink, the margarita stands as an example of the merits of simple preparation and good ingredients. A 'top shelf' margarita is a waste of expensive tequila, Grand Marnier and a poser's cash; this drink is just as good with Cuervo (or worse, if there is such a thing) and your locally made triple sec as long as you have that one, right thing - fresh lime juice. There are, in Austin, literally scores of good margaritas to be had and they all have this in common.

Polvos has a few dishes I go back for over and over. The migas are the best breakfast in South Austin - said with apologies to The Magnolia, but without qualification. The chips are just stale enough to give a slight crunch and an excellent chew, the jalapenos are fresh rather than brined, and the chorizo smoky and delicious. Add some cheese on top, a swirl of refried beans and a stack of tortillas to eat it with and you've got what mankind has been looking for for centuries, nay, millenia with limited success: the perfect cure for the common hangover.

Enchiladas are the mainstay of the menu at Polvos, with a dizzying variety of fillings and salsas that allow you to indulge your limited math skills in the construction of your meal. Fillings range from the pedestrian - chicken, cheese, picadillo - to the traditional - guisado and al pastor. The salsas could keep you busy for days. Fifteen varieties, and rather than summarize, I'll put 'em all here: tomatillo, mole, carne guisado, chiptole, roja, chili con queso, poblano, ranchero, ahumada, haustaca, cartuja, pipian, margarita, veracruzano, calientes. Not an enchilada man myself (nothing against them, but they aren't my favorite), my trusted sources have yet to find a bad combination, and for the most part they are great to excellent.

A couple of dishes you should try: the chile rellenos al Nogal are a surprising and superb dish, the peppers large, stuffed to capacity with your choice of filling and then smothered in a nutty, caramelly and slightly sweet pecan cream sauce. It is rich and filling but delicate and delicious as well, and something I have found nowhere else. Also excellent is the Michocan salad - basically pico de gallo with a generous addition of chopped avocado and, again, fresh lime - an excellent appetizer, especially when combined with a margarita or three.

As with many tex-mex joints, the menu at Polvos is extensive, and, as examplified by the enchiladas, combinatory. I have not, I confess, plumbed its depths entirely, but I've rooted around enough to know that this is a restaurant driven by the taste buds. In the Age of Commercialism, as this one will come to be known once the corrective lenses of history have been put on our societal noses, there are many, many factors that go to make up a dining experience, and only a very few of them have anything to do with food. Atmosphere, reputation, location, scenesterism, jargons (sustainable, chemical-free, heart-friendly, wild-caught, gmo-transfat-cholesterol-artificial-everything-and-flavor free [ack], vegan [double ack]) - all employed to sell us food. And make no mistake, it's a market, not a place of worship that throws around all of this self-sanctified language. I find it fascinating in an anthropological sense, but utterly corrupt and even immoral as a writer and as an eater. Food is elemental, it is physical and sensual, visceral and intimate; it is not rhetorical, metaphorical or euphemistic - not when it's good anyway. This is not to say that there are not great fancy restaurants, but to say that the greatness of these restaurants starts with the same thing that the greatness of Polvos starts with; the mouth, the nose and the belly.

In the course of this column's gestation and completion, my wife Caroline gave birth to Elias Harper Wilson Wei, our son. A gourmand he is not - yet - his appetite running the very narrow spectrum from right to left breast, but are you going to argue to me that he gains less satisfaction from his 'dining experience' than I would at the French Laundry? You can make the point, and probably do it elegantly, perhaps substantively, amusingly and maybe even compellingly. Consider this, however - wailing, vocal cord wrenching, red-faced despair to silent, angelic joy in the time it takes to put his mouth on the source. Go ahead, make your case; I'm not buying it. Polvos, as all good restaurants, starts with a love of food, a physical, personal, passionate love. Like family, it all flows from there. So go there, grab yourself a folding chair, stuff a paper napkin into your shirt, ignore the Subaru that just pulled up to one end of your table and order a marg and some queso - and make sure you do it with loved ones.

And while he ain't eatin' any queso yet, you better believe that Elias is gonna be weaned on Polvos. Goddamn skippy.

Public Life and the American Diner: The Magnolia Cafe

For good examples of public life, we Americans generally look to Europe, to the cafe or the pub. There is a wistful quality to our gazing longingly across the pond at these fora, burnished images of Parisians sitting at neatly aligned tables, basking in long, autumnal sun rays, or Muncheners laughing loud and singing vigorously and off-key around a heavy-boned table in a high, thick-timbered stube, or Venetians standing at the cappucino counter, arguing emphatically with their fellow citizens, their soundtrack the distant cry of the gondoliers, the sussurant cooing of pigeons, the wheeze of a calliope in the corner. Who wouldn't long for such idylls? They are lovely, and having indulged in a few of them in my various moments of waywardness, I admit that they can be nice, if you like that kind of thing.

But at a certain point I get impatient with all of that other-loving, exotification crap. I mean, let's be real - it's fun to visit Europe, to hang out in these places for a while, to feel like we're absorbing 'culture,' but, as William Carlos Williams once said, why should we spend so much time learning English when we have a perfectly good language of our own? We're Americans, and while hanging out in Le Odeon for the afternoon reading Le Monde and sipping at a glass of le anisette is an authentic part of la vie for le Parisian, it's actually a part of le vacation for us. Sure, when we're feeling restless or special, we'll get a croissant, but toast is what we usually eat, and omlets (not omelettes) aren't for lunch - they're for breakfast. And pancakes? Well, if you want a pancake in France, be prepared to be sneered at, if you're understood at all. Nope, it may not be the same thing, but the equivalent to the pub or cafe' as it's evolved in the freedom-loving US of freakin' A, in spite of all of the efforts of Starbucks, is the diner. You want to understand Madrid, go to the bars; you want to know Dublin, spend time in the pub; Rome, the cafe's. You want to know a neighborhood, a city, a town, a village in this country, go to the diner, and in Austin, this means The Magnolia Cafe.

The Magnolia greets you with a sign that says, "Sorry, We're Open," setting just the right tone: slightly acerbic, familiar and not at all precious. This is the ethos of the diner as a form; it's not, as it purports (one must believe smirkingly) a place to dine - it's a place to eat. It's not a place to make the scene; it's a place to jaw. And if you want to sit up straight, more power to you, but most of us slump, throw an arm over the booth back or chair next to us and cut our meat with the sides of our forks. This is home, or an annex thereof.

The Magnolia that I frequent is on South Congress Ave, at the tapering (or sharpened) end of the up and coming (some might argue done and gone) trendy, artsy strip. I'm told that the neighborhood, until recently, was not a particularly nice one, that the gentrified cottages and bungalows that lounge in the shade of the large old live oaks in the blocks behind the place were once rundown, unprettified and cheap as dirt. This kind of characterization I usually take as code for a neighborhood where upper middle class white folk felt at risk, which is it's own secret way of saying that, well, maybe they weren't at risk as much as they just weren't, as they are accustomed to, automatically considered the most specialest people on the planet. In old Soco, I conjecture, these folk were probably looked at, talked to and treated like they, just as everybody else, had fucked up a few times in their lives, had some problems lurking under their polished super-egos, and might even, given the chance, be assholes. Or good people - either way, it wasn't just a foregone conclusion that, because you drove a BMW, you were trustworthy, accomplished, elegant, morally upstanding and competent.

This attitude still holds true at Magnolia. The place is a little bit shabby, a little bit grungy, the wait staff and kitchen folk are the same, the food is basic, plentiful and not particularly charismatic, and no apologies are needed or offered. In fact, you'll eat there precisely because of these things. The menu offers the standards that any diner needs to offer: burgers, fries, clubs and monte cristos; pancakes of several varieties, omlets (under breakfast, where they belong), breakfast combos; chicken fried steak, a few pasta dishes, a chop here, a chicken finger there. Do I need to give you detail? No - because you could probably name 80% of the dishes Magnolia serves without ever setting foot in the place. A few of the offerings, if you weren't from these parts, might surprise - enchiladas on the dinner side, migas on the breakfast - but if you're from the east coast, just substitute the gyros, and if your from the west, the brown rice, tofu and vegetable stir-fry. Not great, not offensive, but good enough to eat while you're talking about what the hell you were thinking when you decided to have that 9th or 11th or 13th shot the night before. It's food that won't make you feel worse, and will probably make you feel better (depending on just how many shots you did).

My wife and I eat breakfast at the Magnolia, almost exclusively. Caroline is a habitue of the cornmeal pancakes (massive), the corn bread (seeing a pattern?) and the scrambled eggs - all good, solid choices. Offering real maple syrup for the flapjacks makes me happy, as well as the option to mix in blueberries, pecans or other enhancements. I usually get an omlet - the T-Rex is a solid, 90s throwback combo of turkey and avocado with the nice addition of some jalapenos - or just eggs and sausage (patties, no links, which is just fine with me). It's all good, delivered without too much fuss by people who obviously both enjoy working there and don't feel the need to compromise their self-esteem in doing so. Go there once and they'll be polite. Go a few times and you'll probably get a hello and a smile that's more than just obligatory. Go there a bunch and you'll make some friends.

On a given morning at Magnolia, you'll see a good bucketful of hungover U Texas and St. Edwards University kiddies, carefully frowzy and, as all people of that age, either being made or on the make; a handful of families from the neighborhood, kids sporting mohawks or shag cuts and looking way, way too cool for their parents; a few professors from the aforementioned institutes of higher ed trying not to notice their students; some emaciated, multi-tatted rock and roll musicians who are legitimately hungover (occupational liability); a few scenesters trying to look more hungover than they are; young couples who are so desperately in lust that they have to sit not just on the same side of the table, but actually on top of each other; a few lost supermodels from up the way; a couple of equally lost suburbanites from the other direction; maybe a biker, maybe a tweaker, and any number of tourist types who have found their way here because it's in every guide book ever written about ATX. There are folks of color, 'mos and dykes, old and young, hippies, yuppies and red-necks, frat-boys, prom-queens and junkies.

It's a beautiful scene if you're eyes are attuned, as mine, to the way the massive variety of shapes and colors that are America break against one another, then re-form, then break again, like the colonial, post-colonial, immigrant and post-slavery flotsam that we are. And yes, while there is something very special about a pub in Dublin, whole families packed into tiny booths, the young 'uns drinking milk and the elders the milk of the malt; or a courtyard trattoria in Fiesole, a clan gathered around massive platters of antipasto and heaps of pasta, toasting and arguing and laughing, no less special is that old pirate sitting over there, shoulder to shoulder at the counter with a pretty young thing, who is being looked over by a dope in Polo shirt and faux hawk, who is being laughed at by a group of pegged-jean hipsters who are being checked out by the pirate's 'mo friend who the pretty young thing thinks is straight and just sooo cute...and that's just the tables near the kitchen. Whether it's the Austin you like or hate, or pine for or rail against, that's waxing or waning or just plain staying right where it is, you'll see it at the Magnolia. Go, and while you're there, have a bite to eat.

The Magnolia Cafe - several locations, including South Congress at Live Oak

Meditations on the Evil of Banality: The McSpensive Restaurant

The McSpensive Restaurant. Austin, being a city that hosts a number of conferences a year, and just being an American City in the 21st century, contains within its limits a fair number of these institutions: McCormick and Schmicks, Ruth's Chris, Eddie Vee's, Trulucks, Finn and Porter...do I need to go on? You know what and who I am talking about. High-end chain joints that try to make you feel like Frank Sinatra. The food is rich and pricey, the waitstaff obsequious and the atmosphere overdone and contrived. My wife Caroline and I will occasionally find ourselves at one or another of these places - as guests of some out of town friend or other, or when, in moments of amnesiac craving (maybe the Seventies did take their toll on me) we might think, "Where can I get a good lobster/steak/plate of crab legs?" and the answer will come, "Why at one of the temples of Satan," and off we go to a deplorable and financially depleting disappointment.

So, what is so bad about these places? Let's take the experience apart. You enter and are met at the maitre 'd's station by a guy named Jonny (wait a minute, that's my name - note to self, never slick back your hair) with slicked back hair, Armani suit and tassel loafers who smilingly looks you up and down to make sure you're up to the 'standards' of the place. The truth of the matter is that the standards of the place have nothing to do with your character, style, background or accomplishments and everything to do with that lowest of common denominators - what's in your wallet. But Johnny is struggling with a pathological inferiority complex brought on by working in a McSpensive restaurant, and so has an overwhelming need to make everyone but the real Frank Sinatra feel the horrible vacuum of not being Frank Sinatra. His pain must be your pain. It's a vicious cycle.

You're ushered with overcompensatingly cloying politeness to your Corinthian leather banquette by a beautiful and automatonic hostess (Jonny has other customers to sneer at), who looks you vacuously in the nose and tells you to enjoy your meal. She leaves you with wine lists and menus in folders that look like they could survive a nuclear blast, and a smile that makes you feel like Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner. You've just entered the The Village, you're now Number Six, and you'll never have to worry about anything again - except, of course, getting out of here. "Be seeing you."

Your waitperson is next with a bottle of filtered water (filtered by what? a screen fashioned cleverly out of lithium?) and an explanation of how the food at this particular restaurant is specially cultivated, caught, raised and/or prepared, how the steaks are aged angus, the fish netted wild by their own fleet of boats, the recipes unique. It all sounds right, it sounds like it's supposed to. And yet, it all sounds so hauntingly familiar - you've heard it before. But where? And who was saying it? Oh, but it doesn't matter, not really. It's so cushy and comfy in here, and the music is so soothing (Frankie, Frankie, Frankie), and the lights so cave dim, and the waitperson so attractive and unremarkable. Everything is so vague and fuzzy. It's fine. I'll just have another sip of that yummy filtered water, and relax, melt into the padding. Who would want to be anywhere else anyway?

Don't get me wrong - I love Frank Sinatra. But the thing about Frank Sinatra was that no one else was Frank Sinatra, and herein lies my rub with the McSpensives - that none of them are Frank Sinatra, but they're all trying to make you think they are. Like Old Blue Eyes's stand-ins, these places are restaurant studies, but not actually restaurants; they are financial establishments that serve food, rather than eating establishments that make money - and syntax is everything. McSpensives are the creations not of chefs, gourmands, cooks or even just good entertainers, but of number crunchers, investors and bankers, of risk-averse, imagination-dead yes men who consider it good night when the figures add up, regardless of whether a decent dish was served.

Okay, you're thinking, why is he writing this column? Fine - last night my wife Caroline and I ended up in one these places. Actually, we decided to go there. I won't name the place - why do we have to use names when they're all so much alike? Okay it was Truluck's - are you happy? We went there out of choice, we paid through the nose, we left feeling overstuffed and ashamed of ourselves. She had lobster, I had crab. We split chocolate cake for dessert. She had a caesar salad (see The Long Lunch for my estimation on that one), I had little neck clams. We may as well have broken into song and broken a few of our closest enemies fingers to really authenticate the experience. Oh, my readers - this is my confession.

The same filet, the same wild-caught salmon, the same Alaskan king crab, the same grand cru, the same Sapphire martini. If you feel like you've entered a place outside of time, outside of reality, it's because you have. You've entered a dead zone. Repetition, you see, is unnatural; variety is the tendency of the observable universe. Sure, we can speculate mathematically on the Unified Field, but if you look around, things just don't repeat. Try to break a wine glass in the exact same way twice; close, maybe, but no cigar. Find two snowflakes that match; or two oak leaves; or two preppy sophomores. Sure, they may both wear the exact same faux-hawks, pegged jeans and polo shirts, but they will each be idiots in their own, unique fashion.

"What makes this so special," my waitress said last night, describing my crab legs (ever wonder why the waitstaff start every sentence with, "What makes us special..."? Maybe it's cuz, well, actually nothing makes the place special - nothing! - including the subordinate clause, "What makes us special..." - and this highly noticeable state of affairs has to be addressed at every possible opportunity), "What makes this so special is that we broil these Norwegian king crab legs in butter."

Crab legs in butter? I have to call Jonesy about this! Jonesy! You won't believe what we've stumbled upon!

Repetition is the attempt to remove struggle from the picture, to be the no problem guy without trying, to be perfect without knowing imperfection. It reminds us of death, of the garden where fruit hangs always ripe from the bough, of the cruise ship in Monty Python's 'Meaning of Life,' where you can order Philosophy off of the menu as a topic of conversation, of endless, endlessly dull harp playing among cloud hosts of catatonic do-gooders. McSpensives are a celebration of antiseptic death, of the vanquishing of variable, uncertainty, failure, dirt, darkness, soul, wisdom, knowledge; they are Rilke's nightmare of the industrial age. Try to talk about the war in McCormick and Schmick's (because we are, in fact, still at war), or urban poverty in Ruth's Chris, or the percentage of young black men in prison, or the cents on the dollar that women still earn by comparison to men in this country. Just try. I dare you.

The McSpensive is what we don't want - I exhort you all to join me in this resolution. Culture is endlessly improvisational and variable, it is a function of curiosity, imagination and exploration. It is constantly open to risk and failure. To be governed by impulses toward repetition, imitation and the bottom line is to forget that Frankie was probably a gangster who busted some heads, that he had risky surgery on his vocal cords and might never have sung again, that he got called a wop, an eye-tie, a gumbah and worse, that he probably wasn't a great father and maybe not even, depending on when you knew him, a great friend. Hell, he smoked and drank and womanized. He did bad things.

He also sang like an angel, and you can't have one without the other. A restaurant must have all things - just as a culture, a civilization, an individual must. The McSpensive would try to convince us otherwise, but they are wrong - and not just wrong, but Wrong.

Yes, my dear reader, I did - I worshipped at one of these unholy altars last night. I drained away a chalice full of the blood of our collective soul, and not to make black pudding. Forgive me, please - and learn from my sin.

McSpensive - at a conference center, tourist mall or airline magazine near you.

Enoteca and the Long Lunch

Our 15th Poet Laureate Charles Simic writes about a lunch that he had with his father one afternoon in a restaurant in Chicago, where the two men ate and talked and drank, and had a digestif, then some dessert, then a coffee, then some cognac, then more, then something to go along with the cognac, and talked and talked and talked, until lo and behold, they had been at the table for so long that it was time for dinner, and so they started all over again. To me, this is one vision of paradise.

My first replication of this was at a restaurant called Provence, now defunct, in Soho in New York some ten or so years ago. My friend Curtis had returned after a year in Iowa; it was November, cold and steely outside, but for that even more warm and welcoming inside the cozy restaurant off of Sullivan Street. We ordered icy Atlantic oysters and chilled gin, salad and champagne, creamy, crunchy salt cod cassoulet and steak au poivre with glasses of vouvray, sancerre, gigondas and Bourdeaux to accompany, then creme caramel and crepes with muscat, then espresso, then cognac, and more cognac. Everything was shared and appreciated. And while we left the restaurant before dinner, we outlasted every last one of the lunch clientele, and were eventually joined at our table by our waiter, who dispensed - with a particularly Gallic wave - with the city-wide smoking ban, and then dispensed to us a particularly fine blended cognac which, he swore, had some more than hundred year old spirit in it. It was a great afternoon; we talked about everything from women to poetry to art to our families and back again. We circled the world while seated at that small, wrought iron table next to the bubbling fountain in the glassed-in atrium at the back of the restaurant. We could have been in Paris or Rome or New Orleans or Barcelona or Buenos Aires - and I have no doubt that, at some point during the afternoon, we were in all of them. And though neither of us could really afford a meal of such extravagance at that point in our lives, it was, on balance, by far the least expensive vacation either of us had ever taken.

But this is a blog about the city of Austin, Texas, where I make my home and where I intend to do so until I or the city itself is dead. The relevance of the preceding improvisation is to set the stage for what I have found to be, to date, the single place in this metropolis at which the long lunch is accepted, perhaps even encouraged, and this place is Enoteca.

Let's start with atmosphere; a corner spot, lots of windows, tile floor, a bright, open space crowded with small tables, somewhat noisy and, depending on the crowd, boisterous, the bar shouldering up to the dining area, the pastry counter nudging in on the bar, this place isn't about stars. While it's not quite like eating in the kitchen, it's also not quite like eating in the dining room. More like, well, a lunchroom - a place very near the kitchen that's less formal, more about the food and less about the fashion. A good start.

The first long lunch I had at Enoteca was with my friend David. I've known David for four or five years now. It was with delight that, after having known him for a year or so, I received the understanding that David not only appreciated and practiced the long lunch, but he actually named it as such - no apologies, no disguises, no obfuscations. This was, as much as anything, a statement of his character. David splits his time between his teaching position in Illinois and his writing time in Austin. His yearly arrival back in the Live Music Capital of the World after his sentence in the Land of Lincoln is, for all of us, cause for celebration - a long lunch.

My wife and I had eaten at Enoteca before then, but we hadn't "done" Enoteca. David had, and we let him lead the way. We started with some antipasto (it is an Italian-esque joint, though they also offer pates of several varieties, jamon and jambon, and often garnish with cornichon - none of which work against the meal if you're not a raving purist, which I'm not). Orange and beet salad, spicy cherry peppers stuffed with mozzerella, proscuitto and a bottle of prosecco - like a bedtime story or lullaby, this was a soothing start to a dreamy afternoon. As appetizer (yes, appetizers came after the antipasto - long lunch, you know, emphasis on the long), David insisted on suppli, and he couldn't have been more on the mark. Crisply deep-fried balls of creamy risotto, these things are like angel droppings (hmm...let me think about that one), served on a bed of sweet, tangy marinara. Gimme some more of those - oh yeah. My wife Caroline also ordered the calamari, which were very nicely crisp and tender and served with lemon and an aioli for dipping - and generous. A massive portion that could have been an entree.

Salad at Enoteca is passable, though a little more attention could be paid. The caesar, the most overdone salad in America at this point, was unremarkably good (ie, good enough) and the caprese (the second most overdone salad) better than average (due largely to the house-made mozzerella). The surprising winner of this course was the chopped salad - a composed (rather than tossed) salad of romaine hearts, marinated onion, gorgonzola and olives with a citronette dressing that was both interesting and delicious, each bite different from the the last.

As entree, I ordered the saltimboca - a standard dish, by which I mean it is a dish by which you can judge a kitchen. Preparation is simple but requires precision, and excellent ingredients are essential. At Enoteca, the cutlet is pork (veal is traditional) and it is served on a bed of sauteed spinach. A half of a grilled lemon garnishes, and that's that. It was excellent, the sage, proscuitto and pork loin jumping to my mouth (as the dish's name implies), the spinach providing a nice, earthy counterpoint. The meat was tender, the sauce (a madiera reduction) caramelly and subtle. (It should be noted that I have gone back many times to Enoteca and ordered the saltimboca and found it sometimes as good, sometimes not, though never bad.) Caroline and David had pasta - housemade pappardelle bolognese and spaghetti carbonara- which were both solid.

Funny that I find myself a little annoyed at the moment with all of this attention paid to, well, food - funny, because this is, after all, a blog about, well, eating. Are you feeling the same way? Because there is a higher purpose to this particular entry - not higher than eating, but higher than food - the food, at any rate. We had a cheese plate, dessert was excellent - let's leave it at that. Enoteca has variety, they pay attention. Grappa, armagnac, cognac, a few dessert wines (including vin santo, of which I am particularly fond), good espresso - all of these are also very pleasant. But they aren't the point - or, at least, they in particular aren't the point.

The point is, Enoteca is a good restaurant - very solid bistro food, very reasonable prices, they pay attention to what they are doing and they do it consistently. But even that's not the point. The point is that Enoteca, in addition to serving good food, stays open from 11:30 in the morning until 10 at night. The point is that Enoteca offers antipasto, appetizers, salad, entrees, pastas, a cheese plate, desserts, a decent wine selection, a decent digestivo selection, good espresso - and they give you time to actually enjoy all of it without having to feel like you're keeping someone late at work, or you're being a nuisance, or you're perhaps dangerous or indigent because you feel it is more important to sit with your good friends and talk through the afternoon rather than get back to whatever mundane task is shrilly demanding one percent of your brain power and ninety percent of your soul at the office. Admittedly, our waitperson was amused and perhaps a little confused by our lingering - though to her credit, she was in no way annoyed - but she very quickly understood the spirit of what we were doing, and she was helpful, well-informed about the menu and had good opinions (and this has almost always been the case when we've lunched long at Enoteca - almost).

We caught up. We criticized. We shot shit and hatched plans. We were excited, amused, sad and angry. We felt the love and the hate and the myriad between. We were, for that afternoon, complete - physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually engaged. How often does this happen? When else in our lives of deadlines, logistics, appointments and administrative folderol do we allow ourselves to fully breathe, to enjoy with all of our bodies and souls the bounties of the earth, the fundamental chemistries of heat and salt and herb, while our minds and hearts float and observe like falcons in an updraft - when else?

The art of the long lunch is the art of conversation, the ability to find and cultivate attenuated, tangential and oftentimes unreplicatable strands of thought, to follow them beyond a logical or practical conclusion, and to a place of reverie, meditation and absurdity that is, for the very fact of its being nonsensical to anyone who is not present him or herself, a form of deep intimacy. It is a radical practice, one that can result in innovation, inspiration and revolution. It is, in the right circumstances and with the right people, revelatory, demanding of us that we push beyond the layers of rationalization, revision, persona and compromise under which we armor ourselves against the daily slings and arrows, and find and express our battered but still breathing, still beating ideals, our deepest selves, our dearest aspirations and most corrosive frustrations. It is the practice of friendship, whether you have known the people at the table for fifty years or five minutes, and it is the practice of honesty. It is different from the long dinner insofar as it demands that we make room for it rather than it accomodating our schedules, and insofar as there is no foreseeable terminus - no bedtime, no kids' bedtime, no work in the morning, no HBO serial or restaurant closing time that allow a person a convenient, inconvenient or any other kind of out.

In this country, it is becoming a lost art. Restaurants have lunch hours and dinner hours, catering to the office set for whom eating is pragmatic, often untasted and status or diet driven. You're kicked out at 2 or 3 in the afternoon to wander the streets or find a bar - which just isn't the same - or to go home, or to go back to work. Either that or you find yourself at Denny's, where food is delivered with the velocity and subtlety of a cannonade and lingering is called loitering - and how convenient that that's a table of cops right there, to make sure you've paid and on you're on your way before anything resembling a thought has had a chance to pass through your brain.

But, you may say, what kind of life do you have that you can have a lunch all afternoon? In Ancient Greece, it was the obligation of every citizen to spend days at the Forum, to participate in debate concerning the issues of the day. In this way, the society was kept engaged, vigorous and dynamic. In our modern day version of democracy, I take this obligation seriously - and the long lunch is a part of that. I encounter myself, my community, my nation and my world over the course of a seven hour conversation in a way that I will not in any other realm. Everyday? Deadly. Every week? Hardly. Every month? Only rarely. But every year, a few times - three or four, maybe five or six in a good year - definitely. Necessarily. That's three days total out of 365 devoted to figuring out the world's problems - not much considering the state of the world. Anything less is irresponsible.

Enoteca - South Congress at Monroe (And if there are others like it in Austin, let me know - the more the better.)

A Torchy's Song - Ode to the Green Chili Pork Taco

Okay, so nothing new in this particular column - nothing that hasn't been written in several dozen other columns in the city of Austin, that hasn't been said by hundreds, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of others - residents, tourists, travelers - who have had the privilege of putting their lips, tongues, tonsils and tummies to one of these delightful objets. They are great - and if you don't know it, you should. This is the purpose behind this column - to get to the stragglers, hermits, outsiders and otherwise socially isolated few who haven't heard that these are the best in town. And also, just to crow - cuz they're so good they make me feel like Julie Andrews (or Mary Martin, depending on your paradigm) in the hills of beloved Austria. The tacos are alive with the taste of pork.

Roast pork, to be exact, and this is where this ode begins. Pork shoulder is a piece of meat of which no one south of the Mason Dixon line is ignorant; it's basically the front ham, a little more fatty and a little smaller than its counterpart, but with a muscly striation that makes it a wholly different piece of meat, one that does magical things with low heat applied over a long period of time. Sing, muse, of connective tissue. You see, all of those little striations are separated one from another by thin layers of tissue, tissue that, due to its chemistry (don't ask me, I don't know) will, with said low heat over said long period, liquefy. When you 'pull' pulled pork, and all of those delicious strands fall away from one another, it's because that connective tissue has liquefied, rendering the meat both devilishly tender and moist.

Pork shoulder roasted until it wilts like a Victorian maiden at the mention of her wedding night obligations forms the basis of this admirable taco, and while it's hard to go wrong from here, it's also not particularly easy to improve upon. Torchy's does - which is what makes this taco great. A sprinkling of cochitl cheese adds both a silky element and highlights the smoky, caramelly goodness of the pork. No less, the aromatic addition of a generous frissee of chopped cilantro (did I just say frissee? - I hate that word) and a fat wedge of lime to be squeezed at the eater's discretion, all topped off with as much or little of the tangy, tomatillo driven salsa that comes de riguer with the taco as one's heart desires, and you've got just perfection, a piece de amor, a magnum opus.

There are, of course, other offerings at Torchy's. My wife has a preference for the fried avocado taco. I was impressed by the Double-wide, an unholy combination of chicken fried steak, bacon, salsa and some form of ranch dressing (really good, though I could actually feel my arteries silting in as I ate it). There's also the Republican (a jalapeno sausage taco that was like, well, a hot dog), and the Democrat (barbacoa, which I love, but which is better elsewhere in town). Their chips are freshly fried, greasy and good, and their queso and guac more than passable. But really, if the green chili pork taco wasn't on the menu, I might spend more time standing in front of the trailer, perusing the menu, debating one or the other, trying to estimate from among the offerings what selections would make for a balanced dining experience.

But it is on the menu - the green chili pork taco. Let me say it again: green chili pork taco. Does it roll off the tongue? Yes, folks, it most certainly does - and right into your ecstatically dancing tummy.

Torchy's - South 1st and Milton, in a trailer in a parking lot, so you know it's good.