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.)