Recently in austin Category

[Pre-disclaimer: This has been sitting in my unpublished drafts since before the BP oil spill turned so catastrophic.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.

I'm sitting here in my bed poking around on the innerwebs, I hear a far off whistle, and I'm thinking to myself how nice it is to be close to the river again so that I can hear the sounds of ships at night, the sounds that I used to fall asleep to when I was a kid.

Then I remember I'm back in Austin.

"No, dear, this is the dream, you're still back in the cell."

Which means it wasn't a ship, it was just a fucking train.

Sigh.

OK, so, see, I am what you call powerless over ice cream, but have not hit the proverbial bottom yet, so I can remain mostly in denial while concocting ever-more-elaborate schemes to try to maintain some semblance of moderate ice cream consumption. I rarely eat it at home, I try not to eat it every day, I try to limit myself to one scoop. I tried the old "I'll eat gelato, it's weaker stuff so I can drink eat more" but that didn't really work out.

I'm also a big fan of the "I can be a full-blown ice cream addict in Austin and still maintain moderate sobriety in New Orleans" geographic cure gambit. And it doesn't help that my ice cream sponsor lives in Austin and is ironically as big a crush'n's hound as I am.

So my past couple of trips to Austin, I've been working on a combo concept for Amy's, which is a much better venue for customer creativity than Creole Creamery or Brocato's because you can invent a lot more crazy shit on the fly. I was in the 6th Street Amy's, where Roky Erickson hangs out, and the name "Chasing The Dragon" popped into my head.

The perfect name for an addiction-based ice cream combo, but what to put in it? I enlisted the help of an Amy's scooper named Drew, and we both pondered it over several weeks.

My ice cream sponsor, who is also a noted former pharmaceuticals connoisseur, immediately said, "ooooo, sweet cream with Vicodin and butterscotch". (It's always about the butterscotch with her.) But my inside man at Amy's said the Vicodin wouldn't crush up real well, and besides, DEA and all. Joyless bastards.

Anyway, last visit, it came to me. I told Drew: "espresso ice cream, chocolate chips, and cinnamon, with whipped cream". He thought a minute, grinned, said "I'll allow it!" and made one for me on the spot. He recommended lots of cinnamon, I thought he should go easy at first, but he was right, so while I was eating he brought me more cinnamon in a cup to sprinkle on top. It ended up as a light dusting on top of the whipped cream. Which was perfect. They make their own whipped cream at Amy's, not that stuff in the can.

Go to the 6th Street Amy's, ask for it by name. If Drew is there, he knows how to make it. And if it shows up on the specials board, tell them I want my royalties paid in product.

We're finally back on Netflix after taking a break for a couple of years, and the first two movies out of the gate both have weirdness to them.

Terminator 2: Has anybody ever noticed that the predicted Judgement Day when the world is destroyed by nuclear war is August 29, 1997? Fucken weird.

You're Gonna Miss Me: This 2005 documentary about the life of Roky Erickson and about his younger brother Sumner's struggle to get him the psychiatric care he needs is f-ing brilliant. You get to see a lot of footage of Roky's decline while under the care of his anti-doctor mother, and then a brief glimpse of the new Roky near the end.

The weirdness is in the Epilogue special features. There is footage from Roky's re-debut at the 2005 Austin City Limits fest, and Cassidy and I are in several crowd shots. And not in a "I know I was standing right about here" kind of way, but in a "holy shit, that's me and Cass!" kind of way. We were directly in front of Roky against the front of the stage; I blogged it here.

And then the other weirdness is in the same epilogue. They show Roky getting ice cream at the Amy's on 6th Street, the same ice cream place where I ran into him in August 2005. I don't remember cameras being there that night but there is a guy visible very very briefly in the background who kinda sorta might be me.

I'll be in Austin next week, and I'm going to Amy's to get the Roky special. I'll let you know how good it is.

I just got back from a four-day weekend back in Austin, having Chris Trevino put the first eight hours worth of ink on my other sleeve. This one is cardinals, and will work around the existing celtic cross that Freddy Corbin did for me many years ago. I'll have pictures up by Thursday, hopefully.

I didn't really do much in Austin, other than loiter around the tattoo shop during the day, and lay in my room twitching at night. And eat lots and lots and lots of Mexican food. I told the guys in the tattoo shop that Mexican restaurants in New Orleans charge for chips and salsa, and they all agreed that that there is some fucked up shit. Hiromi showed up to watch on one day so we got to chat for a bit. It's fun watching her and Chris interact; they're both used to being the only person in the room who knows a lot about Japan, and neither has a very high bullshit tolerance, so they circle each other warily in conversation for a while before they figure out the other one is legit and then the conversation starts going way over my head.

I also managed to miss the social event of the season: they finally blew up the Intel building downtown. Intel started construction on their new trendy downtown Austin headquarters during the Internet bubble, and then when the Clinton boom turned into the Bush bust and the Austin economy tanked, Intel just walked away and left a big stinking hunk of blight on the city skyline. Because, you know, they're Intel and they really just don't give a fuck. Somebody took a time lapse of the implosion and has it up in a flickr set here, if you want to make a flip book out of it.

And thus died my dream of turning it into a four-story-tall Liberty Lunch. Sigh.

More work on the tattoo in September. Hopefully I won't have to do that drive again any time soon; anything grueling enough to make the twinkling lights of Kenner actually look good to me can't be emotionally healthy in the long run.

[Peeps me, baby: 25Peeps]

I was grubbing around looking up volunteer search and rescue stuff and ran across a whole pile of pictures taken at the training simulation we did in Austin right before I moved here. If you've been reading my blog since then you probably remember reading about it here.

The photos from the US-HERO training site are here (4 pages worth). I'm in about six or seven of them (green shirt, green vest, green helmet), but the three below are the only ones approximating macho action shots. As usual, the photos don't convey the whole story since the camera guy was using a flash but it was frickin' dark in there if you didn't have a helmet light.

[Peeps me, preeze, before I disappear: 25Peeps]

I'm out of the country this week, back in America. Austin, specifically. It's definitely a weird feeling here. Not so much the culture shock that other people report, more just a vague sense of homesickness. Not that I want to move back; if I still lived here I'd want to be in New Orleans. But I lived most of my adult life in Texas and my kids were born here so obviously there's going to be a little tug.

I only caught myself looking for the bathtub ring on houses a couple of times. I think it must be the hills that put the thought out of your mind.

There are almost no black people here. I think I've seen fewer than a dozen all week. In New Orleans I would see that many before I got to the end of the block in the morning. For all the talk after the storm about how "segregated" New Orleans is, the difference here is stark. I guess it's easy to talk about other people being segregated when your own city doesn't actually have anybody you need to integrate with.

People here say "hi" to strangers on the street much more than in New Orleans. There's too much mistrust, too much fear and exhaustion in New Orleans these days and it's wearing down people's natural friendliness. Plus there's the whole whiteness thing here. It's easy to be friendly to people who look like you.

But nobody in Austin will call you baby.

All of the Starbucks here are open for business. There is other coffee to be had, but you have to know where to look for it.

There are too goddamn many SUVs here.

Like New Orleans, they're bulldozing what makes their city special in the name of growth. In New Orleans, it's Creole doubles in Mid City. Here, I was startled to see that commercial development has made the jump across Loop 360 and is now spreading across the southern end of the greenbelt.

It's very clean here. Clean like parts of Uptown.

I'm scared to drive fast through puddles. I know that the streets here are fine, that there's no chance of there being a 4-foot-deep sinkhole hidden in the water, but I'm conditioned. I once saw a car with its front end stuck in a deep hole in a puddle at Calhoun and Claiborne and now I got The Fear.

The Mexican food here is really good. As is the ice cream. And the water pressure.

I want a french fry po boy.

Back Friday.

In July of 1992, Gina and I flew into Austin from San Francisco for some job interviews. The city life in the Bay Area was starting to wear us down and we were both homesick for the heat we grew up with.

In the Dallas airport, we ran across this issue of Texas Monthly:

and we were ecstatic. Despite what everybody back in SF thought about Texas, we knew we were moving to a liberal oasis and we were going to have the coolest Democratic governor in the country.

Even after she left office in 1995, Ann would pop into our lives from time to time. She lived in our neighborhood in Clarksville so every once in a while we'd see her at the Fresh Plus buying groceries in her gym suit. Her hair was always perfect.

Gina once stood next to her at the Fresh Plus deli counter (where Cippolina is now) with toddler-age Cassidy; Cass was completely grubby as only toddlers can get, with a runny nose on top of it all, and Ann turned around and said "Oh, how cute". Gina is still embarrassed that she was really thinking "bad mom".

We'd see her sometimes at her regular booth at Las Manitas. I thinik I heard she always ordered the migas con hongos, which are indeed spectacular.

Later near the end of my drinking years, I saw her on Dennis Miller's show talking about her own history of drinking and sobriety, and she was one of the first people to really plant the idea in my head that you can be sober and still be funny and interesting. And coincidentally, when I finally found my AA sponsor, he turned out to be a friend of both Ann and Liz Carpenter, the two most famous Democrat ex-drunks in Texas.

Ann is the last elected official that ever represented me that I was really truly enthusiastic about.

I've been saying it since 1995, and I will keep saying it. Ann, you're still my governor. You'll always be my governor.

I won't say "rest in peace" because I can't imagine that a little old thing like dying is going to make you want to rest. I'm sure you're still givin' them hell.

I have his bumper sticker on my car. I signed his petition. I started to wonder about him when I found out that he voted for GWB in 2004, but I still kinda liked the guy.

Then this:

"The musicians and artists have mostly moved back to New Orleans now," he said, according to KHOU-Channel 11. "The crackheads and the thugs have decided to stay. They want to stay here. I think they got their hustle on, and we need to get ours."

I need another New Orleans sticker to cover up your sorry ass name on my bumper, 'cause I'm ashamed to be seen as a former supporter.

Fuck you, Kinky. And if Willie agrees with you, then fuck Willie too.

I'm so goddamn glad I'm not in Texas any more. And I hope everybody else gets to come home from Texas real soon.

Assholes.

First, the Emergency Blogcasting System is the creation of a bunch of Austin techie activists led by Chip Rosenthal:

The Emergency Blogcasting System (EBS) is an association of Austin-area weblog authors who will contribute to a regional disaster response through communication and citizen reporting enabled through blogging.

The EBS is under development. Official release is planned late August 2006.

Mission

The mission of the EBS for bloggers is:

* Educate the blogging community of the role they can play in a disaster situation.
* Identify and publicize primary sources of information that may assist bloggers in their task during a disaster situation.
* Establish and encourage best practices for bloggers during a disaster situation.

The mission of the EBS for the general community is:

* Publicize the constructive role that bloggers may play in a disaster situation.
* Bring attention to valuable blogging and citizen reporting during a disaster situation.
* Dissemenate information to people less connected to official and conventional channels, with particular attention to the diversity of cultures and languages in our community.

This work arose out of the experiences Austin bloggers and techies had with disseminating information during Katrina and Rita and with helping storm evacuees use the Internet while they were in Austin.

Second, Brian Oberkirch's HurricaneMind is an application of "hive mind" principles to quickly disseminate information about an upcoming storm based on patterns in large numbers of inputs:

For instance, last night I had a tough time sleeping, worrying about yet another super powerful hurricane about to enter the Gulf later this week. One thing that happens as a storm gets closer is everyone starts asking each other: What are you going to do? Ride it out? Board up? Nothing? Leave town? So I outlined a little Web app that asks people what they are planning to do. You type in your zip code and it tells you what your neighbors have in mind. Here’s a specific user behavior written large (and quickly) through the power of the Web. You have more info and can make a more educated decision based on the collected insights of the hive mind. Now, let’s take it farther and start gathering up recommended backroad evacuation routes. The main arteries pack up quickly, and long time natives know the best ways out. Let’s gather them. Mash them up with Google maps. Port in hotel availability in the cities that people typically go to — like Baton Rouge, Jackson, Birmingham, Houston, etc. Flow in the updates from the hurricane center in a pane. Suddenly, we have a little dashboard people can use to make better decisions for their families & neighbors. Much better than flipping through channels or pulling up a series of bookmarked sites, burrowing through forums, etc.