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?