May 2010 Archives

I've had a moderate case of writer's block since my last bout of unemployment, mixed with a resurgence in my chronic no-goddamn-time-for-anything-productive condition. I owe some revisions to The Northville Review. I'm overdue to post something other that idle chit-chat at Back of Town. I'm halfway to New Orleans, camped out in a hotel in Beaumont because pushing all the way through would have meant doing that last hour of dark dark road at 3am and I just don't like to set myself up to be so overjoyed to see Kenner like that, not intentionally anyway, and so to pass the time in Beaumont I'm reading The Adderall Diairies, which is in part a memoir of Stephen Elliot's days slumming around my old neighborhood in San Francisco, ruining relationships, and fighting a hardcore case of writer's block.

Which maybe explains why it's 2am and I suddenly feel like writing something. Or maybe it's because I had too much time to think in the car on the way here.

I was listening to the Grateful Dead's American Beauty during the drive, and something about the music and the sunlight and the highway spun my brain with the exact right amount of English on it to dump me all the way back to the Bay Area, 1988. It's the beginning of the summer drought here in Texas, most of the wildflowers are gone but things haven't gotten brown and dead and crispy yet, and the grass along the side of the road is a beautiful radiant gold when the evening sun hits it just right, the same gold that decorates the hills south of San Francisco all along the San Andreas fault.

My first job out of grad school I worked for a big telecom company down in Mountain View. Writing networking software by day, living the very very drunk and wired San Francisco hipster life by night; this was before the whole Internet boom, before there were more than a handful of techies doing the reverse commute from The City to The Valley.

It was a weird time in my life. I had made some choices before moving to SF, some choices that I would later regret, and even back then I had a sense that I had made a mistake. Don't get me wrong, there were some great times, I have memories that I wouldn't trade for anything, but underneath it all was this sense that something was just kind of...off. My life was careening ahead and it was exciting and usually a lot of fun and yet I couldn't get a handle on it, I couldn't quite make sense of it and I couldn't even really grasp exactly what it was I couldn't make sense of.

My afternoon commute up Interstate 280, I used to listen to American Beauty in the car, windows down, the afternoon sun warm on my face, drinking beer and watching the fog roll in over the top of the mountains. It was beautiful, but it also made me ache with homesickness. For Louisiana. For Texas. For the person who had introduced me to the Dead one year driving back to college from a fantastic weekend at Jazz Fest. The same person who I had left behind after graduation because the plan for my life said I had to move to the Bay Area, and I didn't have enough of a sense of myself or what I wanted to be able to deviate from the plan.

I would try to sing along with Jerry, with Bobby, and on some songs it went OK. I mean, as OK as it needed to considering I was alone in the car and usually a little buzzed. But the most haunting song on the album, "Attics of My Life"...well, I would sing along, but it has such a complicated five-part harmony that sometimes I was singing the high voice, sometimes the low voice, sometimes something that was kind of a moving average of all the voices. I loved the song, but I'll be damned if I knew exactly which line in there was the melody. For more than twenty years, I'd sing along as best I could, sometimes well, sometimes poorly, never quite sure if I was getting it right or not. Maybe I needed backup singers, I don't know.

So today I am driving to New Orleans. For the first time since that first job, I am once again working for a big company. I am once again unmarried. I have once again recently made some choices. You could argue that my life is careening again according to some plan that is not of my making. Maybe you could argue that. I don't live in the city where I want to live. I'm not doing the kind of work I want to do (because, well, writing doesn't really pay as of yet). There are people important to me who I am unable to have near me in my day to day life.

And yet, for the first time in a long time, maybe for the first time in my life, nothing feels off. Nothing is out of alignment. Even though not everything is where I want it right now, for the first time ever everything is at least pointed in the right direction.

Somewhere around Brenham, very late in the afternoon, "Attics of My Life" came on, and it was like when you've been struggling forever with a key in a stubborn lock, and then suddenly some imperceptible shift happens, not even enough to call it "movement"; just a slight change in angle or pressure or mere intent, and then the tumblers fall and the key turns without a hint of resistance. I was singing and the idea of the song as a gospel hymn popped into my head and the melody just clicked into place and I got it, I really got it, and I sang it and restarted the track and sang it again, and again, and again.

I know exactly what the melody sounds like now. For the first time, I can hear my way through all the competing voices and I can find the one line that I should be following. And having found it once, I know I will never forget it.

In the book of love's own dream
Where all the print is blood
Where all the pages are my days
And all my lights grow old
When I had no wings to fly
You flew to me
You flew to me

[Pre-disclaimer: This has been sitting in my unpublished drafts since before the BP oil spill turned so catastrophic. My heart isn't into writing anything like this at the moment but I figured since I already wrote it I'd put it out there.]

[Disclaimer: For my Austin peeps, this isn't personal, I pretty much trashed most of the Mexican food in New Orleans when I lived there too.]

I've always had opinions about the few places where you could get one or two decent New Orleans dishes here in Austin (good gumbo at Shoal Creek Saloon, Casey's Sno-Balls are good and authentic although nothing like Hansen's etc), and after getting to live back home the past few years, I'm here again and missing the food more than ever.

And for some reason, I guess because my recent history makes it a conversation topic, people lately keep wanting to know where to get good New Orleans food in Austin, and when I tell them the very short and disappointing list (see below), they feel compelled to tell me where they got some great "Cajun" ("stop: Cajun food isn't New Orleans food," I say; "Yeah, sure, OK, whatever, anyway like I was saying..." they say) food. And I'm always skeptical. But I figure I'm gonna try, every few months, to give some of these great "Cajun/Creole/What-does-it-matter-they-don't-know-the-difference-between-the-two-anyway" food places a try. Because what the fuck else you gonna do while you're living in exile?

So last week I tried Sambets.

Now I had been to Sambets back in the mid-90's. Tried their crawfish etouffee and found it way way way too spicy, and one-dimensionally spicy at that; typically Texan, it was all black and red pepper. Texans are all into that macho "make it hot enough that I scream" bullshit, which is OK for what it is but it's got fuck-all to do with Louisiana cooking, either Cajun or Creole. Creole food should be well-seasoned and balanced, it should not be hot hot spicy and painful. In general Louisiana food has a good deal less heat than Tex-Mex.

But everybody told me "Sambets is great, you should give them another try". And I work in far Northwest hell now, right around the corner from them, so I figured what the hell.

First I googled them. And unlucky me, it looks like they took down their old web site just yesterday because I swear to Christ as recently as two days ago the old site had a picture on it that was supposed to look like it was taken in the French Quarter looking toward Canal Street, but if you looked at it closely, you could actually see that it was taken on Mulberry Street in NYC, in Little Italy looking south towards Chinatown. I totally wish I'd grabbed a screenshot of it.

Fortunately their menu is still up. And from the very first line you begin to notice some weird shit:

"Muffuletta - Cajun tradition!"

Excuse me? Cajun? Jeezus. Sit down and shaddup and let me teach you some basics. It is widely known (outside of Austin, at least) that the muffuletta was invented in the early 1900's in New Orleans, by Sicilians, most likely at the Central Grocery on Decatur Street by Salvatore Lupo, a Sicilian immigrant. It's a Sicilian sandwich. It has Italian meats and Italian cheeses and olive dressing on a type of Sicilian bread which was called "muffuletta". It's a Sicilian word, ferchrissakes. There is nothing remotely Cajun about it, and in the early 1900's there were very few Cajuns at all in New Orleans, since Acadiana is over a hundred miles to the west over on the other side of some pretty daunting swampland.

"Specialty bread brushed with seasoned olive oil, topped with meats and cheese, grilled & heaped with our olive salad"

Grilled? OK, stop. The sandwich is a cold meats sandwich, and though originally intended to be served that way, and is still served only that way at Central Grocery, there is a contingent in New Orleans of "warm muffuletta" fans. But by warm we mean just warm. Not melted, certainly not grilled. You grill a sandwich full of cheese, there's already a name for that: a grilled cheese sandwich.

I point these things out not to be a pedantic dickhead. I point them out because they are examples of people not knowing even the basic history or traditions of a food that they purport to be enough of an expert in that they've decided to open a restaurant to sell it to the public. Whether or not it's good from a culinary standpoint, it is intellectually and artistically just wrong to call this a Cajun tradition or Cajun food, or to serve it as a grilled sandwich.

Anyways, I didn't get the muffuletta. I could have gotten a bunch of these other things though:

Turkey Muff - Turkey, Salami, Provolone Veggie Muff - Pepper Jack & Provolone cheeses grilled, topped with Olive Salad, Lettuce & Tomatoes Pest Muff - Muff with a twist! Pesto spread, Turkey Breast, Provolone, Bacon, Lettuce & Tomatoes, YUM!!

Muff muff muff muff muff WHO TALKS LIKE THAT? What is it about Austinites that everything has to be muffs and bugs instead of muffulettas and crawfish?

Anyway, I thought I'd try the basics. I got a roast beef poor boy and a cup of chicken and sausage gumbo. The roast beef because it's kind of the basic poor boy...it's like a cheese slice at a NY pizzeria, if they fuck up the cheese slice then nothing else they do is going to be worth a shit. And chicken and sausage gumbo is the most basic of basic gumbos.

A typical, average New Orleans roast beef poor boy (and just an aside, the poor boy was also invented in New Orleans, in part by Sicilians, but I digress) is supposed to look like this:

French bread and roast beef with gravy and debris, either plain, or dressed with shredded lettuce, tomato, pickles and mayo. You can request other stuff like Creole mustard. You cannot request onions, and you cannot for the love of God request cheese.

The Sambets poor boy looked like this:

and it's so wrong in so many different ways that I might as well just start from the top and work my way down.

The tomatoes...good, quality tomatoes. Sliced way too thick to be put in a sandwich, which I guess is why they didn't put them in the sandwich, they put them on the sandwich. Now due to the boat-like construction of this thing, there is absolutely no way to hold this sandwich or squeeze it or get your mouth around it in any such way that you can get some tomato as part of a bite of sandwich. The only thing you can do is eat the tomatoes first. Like a salad. Which I did. Which brings us to the next level...

The lettuce....not shredded, but large hunks of Romaine lettuce. Yes, Romaine. Romaine lettuce is so staggeringly wrong for a poor boy. It's one of the more strongly flavored lettuces, and the Romaine-ness of it overpowers the more delicate flavors of the sandwich filling itself. Especially when you put a metric fuckton of the stuff on it like they did here. And again, it rests on top of the boat. Good luck eating the lettuce with the sandwich instead of before the sandwich. You're better off thinking of it as part of the side salad.

At which point we come to the roast beef. It looks like good quality roast beef, cooked right, sliced correctly. And it's got gravy. No sign of debris, but if the gravy is right we can forgive that. Taste the gravy.

SWEET JESUS IT'S SALISBURY STEAK ONION GRAVY!

Sorry, I had a Luby's flashback there. Do I have to explain why the kind of gravy you put on a salisbury steak, reeking of cooked onions like a French onion soup, is not the kind of gravy you want on this sandwich? Just trust me if it isn't obvious. The onion gravy stench is so strong I can barely taste the mayo. In fact I can barely see the mayo. In face why the FUCK is there no mayo on my poor boy? Wait, what's this white stuff?

My god.

It's melted cheese. Provolone, I think. Follow me now....Romaine lettuce, onion gravy, and melted provolone cheese. If you were to draw a culinary Venn diagram around these things, it would be impossible to get all three of them in the same circle without bending space and time so much as to render Stephen Hawking speechless. Romaine lettuce + onion gravy == WRONG. Melted provolone + onion gravy == WRONG from the opposite direction. The flavors just don't work. Again, I'm not being a pedantic authenticity Nazi here; it doesn't matter whether or not this is a traditional New Orleans-style poor boy, because there is no culture on earth where these three flavors can co-exist in the same mouthful and not be repulsive.

After all that, even a fresh loaf of Leidenheimers couldn't save this. Fortunately they didn't waste the good bread on a bad sandwich; it's pretty much a featureless sandwich bun, not particularly crusty or tasty or anything. It's just a receptacle, a means of transporting le déjeuner misérables from table to mouth to trash.

I took three bites (not counting the tomato appetizer). Cassidy took one bite and said toss it. I tossed it.

After that atrocity, the gumbo had to better, and admittedly it was. If it was served to me in New Orleans I'd give it a 4 out of 10, but in Texas it gets graded on a curve so it gets a 6. The roux was actually decent, the sausage was good, the texture was right, they served it over plain white rice. The only problem, the same old problem that Texans always have when they venture into Louisiana territory, was the seasoning. All I could taste was black pepper and thyme. Lots of thyme. Lots and lots and lots of thyme. All the thyme in the fucking world. Seriously, if I put a piece of andouille sausage in my mouth and the most prominent flavor profile is thyme, you've got too damn much thyme in your gumbo.

So, my dear dear friends from Texas: I love you all, but you don't have to recommend Sambets to me any more. I tried.

Next up: a new place in East Austin called the Shuck Shack. They have oysters and crawfish every Friday, I think. OK, I know y'all from New Orleans are wondering how anybody can fuck up a raw oyster, right? Trust me, in Austin it happens all the time. More on that later on.

Oh yeah, the authoritative list of where to get decent New Orleans food in Austin:

1. My house.
2. Popeye's.
3. Get in your car and drive east for, oh, about 9 hours.