Admit it! Austin Is Not a Food Town
A spicy take on how gabby young people on the internet can affect the food and identity of a city
There's a lot of talk about Austin, the city where I live. It's a place, about which, people like to say they hear good things. They hear about our jobs, and the successful companies offering them as they move in downtown. They hear stories about our real estate; stories about our red-state, blue-city politics. Their cousin just tore through town on a fiery bender, went swimming in our public parks and heard some live music on a sweaty afternoon.
We are hip. It is, indeed, happening here. Certainly more hip than my hometown of St. Louis, as I couldn't name a single new enterprise that's come to town. But popularity conflates many other ideals at the mouths of young folk, and unpopularity obfuscates anything worth knowing.
Austin is frequently dubbed a food town or a place for foodies, and although a nomination might make sense to some tourists or wannabe residents, or pilgrims in search of our legendary barbecue, I'd like to opine why those are wholehearted misnomers.
Indeed, Austin has great food. Some if it is unbeatable. It can be mind-blowing and mind-changing. But the trick is to not fall prey to the allure of its shallow devils within the digital realm in order to taste it for real. Travel to the East Side, where many young people wander and take pictures of themselves, and you'll find the type of place that succeeds online and in reservation, yet still fails to season a plate of fries. How can you tell which ones I’m talking about? If you are seated at a restaurant and find every detail within the physical space to be quite intoxicating, yet the food has made you feel nothing other than full… deepest apologies, you’re there.
Well, maybe you haven’t really noticed the bland fries, but, if you're three Polomas deep into that bachelorette party, you're likely to find yourself at one of Austin's most deceitful eateries anyway. For example, there's a mess-hall-of-a-restaurant on the South side putting out refrigerated tomatoes with lime-y ketchup and calling it salsa--but, hey, the stuff is free. Or how about the fact that everyone is so bored of tequila and jalapeño, that nobody has noticed their cocktail is mostly agave and soda anyway? A city of restaurants with tight menus, written in interesting type, does not a food town make.
A proper food town is a city in which you have to work to find a mediocre meal, where everything you eat delights like a magical prize that is realistic about notoriety. It is a delight because it’s just for you: you’re the actual customer, not the potential one. Take New York or Ho Chi Minh City. In NYC, there's perfection and passion in the smallest bite, because it is required for the restaurant's survival. In Ho Cho Chi Minh, everyone in the kitchen just knows what they're doing and it's that uncomplicated. Eating is made a very worthwhile way to spend your time. But in Slacker City, everyone gets a hall pass. Eating is a way to extend the time in between two more important tasks.
Why is the bad food in Austin the way it is? How do we get away with it? Maybe we've all forgotten that it's Austin, or perhaps you haven't yet learned what that means. Why is the Spanish rice is overdone? Someone honestly forgot about it. Why are they serving the true least favorite, yet always earnest, collard greens? We don't know, dude, but everyone else seems to be doing it. Why is the risotto drowning? Someone in the kitchen is finally proud of their sauce.
Austin--on the plate--is not cutting edge, and therefore, to taste the best food, you must look to where there are no edges or even proper table service. If they give you a number and tell you to find a seat, best believe they will locate you whenever they feel like it and exchange that number for actual flavor worth traveling for.
If there's anything the internet has taught us about consumption, it's that the digital variety intoxicates, while its counterpart, the in-person pathway, twists to its own plot. It's not that we notice the flaws in person because there's more to take in outside the frame of an Instagram photo, it's how flaws touch our experience. The chips in the edges of the vintage terrazzo table snag your sweater. The smiley face inscribed at the bottom of the receipt really did make your day. The barbacoa oil dripping out the end of your taco stains your sneakers as you eat standing up. The upper lip sweat of your server is reminiscent of your watered-down cocktail, and as discussed, summer afternoons in Austin are remarkably sweaty.
What happened here is the same trope that ailed a generation: pretty pictures and a false sense of contentedness online. People from New York moved in and immediately realized they don't need to work so hard. People from California moved in and cannot seem to turn off their hype machines. Austin is not a food town. It is a town with foodies living inside of it, posting photos of it and telling everyone else the water is great because it’s warmer than warm.
The internet is a fast-learning and fast-teaching machine, proving to us that when a menu coordinates with decor and vibes, the twenty-somethings flock with their debit cards and their cameras pointed. This is a magic trick called branding. This is the gift of young people on the internet. This is what happens to a growing city with chatty, optimistic mouths feed.
I had a conversation with a distant cousin recently. She lived in Austin before moving back to our hometown in order to start having kids and stop acting like one. St. Louis is a place, she says, that could go toe-to-toe with Austin restaurants. Which ones did she say exactly? I don't remember. Their undesigned names are forgettable. But if there's a good-food race happening sometime soon, bet that any nameable Austin restaurant would sleep through the start time.
Thanks for reading! See you wherever they still have reservations available.
-Nicole