Book Review: Melanie Haupt - Historic Austin Restaurants

Billed as a "cultural history of Austin through its restaurants", I was primed to like this book before even reading it, since I'm a big fan of both Austin's history and its modern food scene, and I agree with her entirely that food is one of the best entrypoints into a city, region, people, or society's culture there is. Haupt wrote this in 2013, but it's not out of date in any way that matters, and though sadly many of its more dire prophecies have been fulfilled since its 2013 publication (RIP Players and Hill's, at least for now), most of the restaurants that Haupt profiles are still alive and serving. Haupt currently writes restaurant reviews for the Chronicle, which makes sense, because her union of individual restaurant profiles, broader cultural connection, interviews with important Austinites, and discussion of what food meant to people blends both interesting reporting and thoughtful analysis. I once maintained a blog about Sixth Street similar to Haupt's one-time plan to blog about restaurants until she decided to repackage her project as this book, and so her work here was both fun to read on its own terms as well as a bit inspirational. You can read through the whole thing pretty quickly, but people who have grown up with these places, like me, will find many items of sociological interest in these stories, and lots to ponder.

The book is divided into five chapters corresponding to various eras of the city, although each jumps around a little in time in order to accommodate the vicissitudes of the restaurant industry and the nonlinear nature of trends. The first chapter wisely begins with Austin's creation as the capital city that no one but its founder wanted to exist. Back then the concept of a "restaurant scene" didn't really exist either - whatever jokes about I-35 traffic you'd like to make, the difficulty of travel in the poorly-paved village of the 1800s meant that dining out was pretty rare even if you didn't live that far away from downtown, especially if like most residents you weren't wealthy, and so instead dinner parties at individual homes played a more prominent role. It's fun to ponder the sociological consequences of their decline, as easier travel, more affordable restaurants, and changing social relations have combined to essentially eliminate the past cultural power of fancy home parties over meals. It's not a coincidence that many of the eateries that survive from that period were either former boardinghouses like Scholz (1881) or hotels like The Driskill (1886) (as a side note, hotel restaurants and bars innovate far less in food and drink than they used to - hotels used to invent dishes like eggs benedict or brownies, and drinks like the piña colada or the martini, but that has mostly ceased), so that was a big conduit for German and Czech immigrants to add their traditions of sausage and kolaches to early Austin cuisine.

Austin was still small in the early part of the 20th century up through Prohibition, so restaurants like The Tavern (1916), Dirty Martin's (1926), and Hut's (1939) often had fairly unadventurous menus. Austin wasn't very cosmopolitan, so outliers like Hoffbrau Steakhouse (1934), whose menu has actually gotten much simpler over time, could easily stand out, especially if their food was good. It's a truism that even though greater affluence drives wider tastes, cuisines are still fundamentally based around cheap staple dishes, so the steaks, burgers, and Southern cuisine that were perfected then still define many of the older Austin restaurants from that period like Hill's (1941), with Quality Seafood (1938) being the outlier as basically the only source of seafood in town. Even the surviving places from the postwar era, like Sandy's (1946), Mrs. Johnson's (1948), Nau's (1951), Dart Bowl (1958), or The Salt Lick (1969), are known for their consistency and unpretentiousness rather than their daring. This is also true of many of the Tex-Mex restaurants from that period like Cisco's (1948), Matt's El Rancho (1952), El Patio (1954), Joe's (1969), and Tamale House (1977), although to be fair, after the popularization of the breakfast taco I'd rest on my laurels too; that's the kind of thing you only need to do once to live forever. I enjoyed reading about Green Pastures (1946) - founder Mary Faulk Koock was the sister of John Henry Faulk, who lent his name to the old central library branch, and in addition to managing that restaurant, she wrote The Texas Cookbook in 1965 with James Beard, of food award fame. It was also neat to learn that integration pioneer Harry Akin, who ran Night Hawk Diner (1932) eventually became mayor in addition to his restaurants spawning not only the Frisco (1953 - 2018) but also Hoover's (1998).

The hippie through Slacker era was pretty good for Austin, as we slowly transformed from a sleepy state capital and college town into a thinkfluencer factory. Many of the cultural tropes that define Austin today - live music, a relaxed attitude, vegetarianism - crystallized during this period. Thus you have the well-known close symbiosis between the music of the legendary Armadillo World Headquarters and the food of Threadgill's (1979), but I had never known the personal connections between the well-known Austin all-hours restaurants: Kenny Carpenter opened the Omelettry in 1978 at its old location on Burnet (they moved east to Airport Boulevard in 2015), partnered with Kent Cole and Patricia Atkinson in 1979, and opened another location on Lake Austin that same year. Kent and Patricia divorced soon after, and in 1986 Kenny sold off his ownership. Cole immediately renamed the west location Magnolia Cafe and opened the South Congress location in 1988; meanwhile Patricia had remarried and opened a little joint called Kerbey Lane in 1980, which went on to dominate everything in its path (the similar romantic/business journey of Dan and Fran from founding Dan's in 1973 to their split in 1990 is interesting too). I've never been to Mother's (1980), and it was hardly the first vegetarian restaurant here, but Austin's image as a city firmly committed to vegetarianism/veganism with a local flavor has been indelibly fixed. The influence of Quack's (1983) on local coffeeshop culture presents an interesting counterpoint, however - could a more entrepreneurial Austin have produced a Starbucks? Would we have wanted to?

There isn't a neat line between the end of the cheap Slacker period and the beginning of the modern gentrification period (from Drag to Brag?), as plenty of high-end restaurants like Jeffrey's (1975), Fonda San Miguel (1975), Texas French Bread (1981), or Chez Nous (1982) opened in those halcyon days of impecunity, but one might say that the current era is defined as much by closings as by openings, at least in the popular consciousness. So the losses of Les Amis (1970 - 1997), Players (1981 - 2016), or Las Manitas (1981 - 2008), each a ringing death knell of "old Austin", loom as large in the discourse as the fact that never in Austin's history has it been easier to eat as well, with as great a variety, as today. Austin is more diverse than ever, which I think is a good thing, since new Austinites have brought a fresh perspective and quite frankly higher standards in many cases. Food trailers have opened a world of possibilities, and the success of Torchy's, East Side Kings, and Franklin is something to be proud of, since the seemingly daily openings of restaurants with new cuisines, and improved versions of old cuisines, are something that previous generations would only envy. Not to say that abundance hasn't brought Austin its own set of problems, but can you imagine going back to the pre-Franklin/Titaya's/Ramen Tatsu-Ya era? I do feel that restaurants like Uchi are not really made "for Austinites" in the same way that, say, Torchy's can fit into just about anyone's budget. Then again, it's not like The Driskill was meant for the common man when it opened (or even now) either, and often it's just a matter of time before a new blight becomes an old classic.

When I was growing up (I graduated high school in 2002), it felt like it was possible for the average Austinite to go everywhere in town and do essentially everything there was to do. I don't think that's the case anymore. A city of a million people is too large for anyone to have the kind of comprehensive experience of the city you could have in the 90s, and as the city's identity becomes larger than any one person's capacity, it means that you have to get used to the idea of multiple Austins, other cities outside your comprehension, coterminous with your own city but forever beyond your ability to reach. In some ways that makes the surviving restaurants of previous decades even more valuable, as they represent a shrinking pool of links to the past. The average lifespan of a restaurant is something like five years, so when you sit down at Dirty Martin's you have the rare privilege of participating in a ritual nearly a century old. However, each restaurant closing also brings home the idea of change and impermanence in a way that's important to learn, because you have to think of all the new rituals being formed all around you. Even though I fully shared the collective sense of loss as I stood in line for Player's on its last day in business, the next day I had the choice to eat at any of the new restaurants that had sprung up around it, any of which could become a future classic. The pancakes at Kerbey Lane are not as good as they were when I was a kid, but who knows, perhaps in 30 years someone will be complaining about how a now-beloved joint in the Domain has really gone downhill from back in the day when only real Austinites went there, not like all the outsiders these days.

Book Review: Luo Guanzhong - Romance of the Three Kingdoms Volume 1

I'm not sure if the term "epic fantasy" applies to this work, since the standard line is that it's "70% history, 30% fiction", but whether it's shelved in "epic fantasy", "historical fiction", or even "magical realism", it's undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of literature. It's almost overwhelming in how full of everything it is: the whirlwind of characters, the unyielding pace of the action, and the seamless integration of so many little human details and emotions that give the many side-plots and minor characters a resonance far out of proportion to their brief page time. Like with all great literature, even those diversions are pure pleasure thanks to clever storytelling. Every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, each analeptic or proleptic excursion adds valuable depth and context to the main narrative, and the consistent treatment of the ways that individual honor, personal loyalty, and political duty overlap and conflict continuously give each and every decision by the main characters a real weight. Luo's account of the struggle to build a new world out of the decay of the old is as powerful as any modern work I can think of.

My edition of the Moss Roberts translation is split into 4 volumes for ease of reading. This volume begins with the immortal incipit "Here begins our tale. The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been." and the oath in the peach orchard between Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei, and ends with Cao Cao's defeat of Yuan Shao at the battle of Jizhou (chapter 32 out of 120). You could spend a long, long time exegizing every aspect of the novel - its elastic grounding in the historical record and subsequent authorial "improvements"; its biases of heroism and colorations of personality that turn these real people into Homeric archetypes; the slight supernatural touches like the summoning of convenient storms, fatal hauntings of vengeful ghosts, or complex portents and astrological divinations; the way the actions of individuals recapitulate the recurrent patterns of imperiogenesis and imperiopathosis in Chinese history - but a few specific observations came most readily to mind as I finished the first quarter of the tale.

First, imperial power is a fascinating contradiction here. As the saying goes, "civilizations die from suicide, not by murder", and the slow disintegration of the Han dynasty amid the famines and religious fervor of the Yellow Scarves movement (interestingly, this colored clothing rebellion will be echoed several times more at similarly turbulent junctures in Chinese history) is reminiscent of a hollow, gradually rotting tree. While the Emperor's authority is nominally unlimited and he commands (nearly) universal respect, in practice the various warlords, rogue generals, and aristocrats seem to rule with complete independence, and the actual personage of the Emperor is treated somewhat like the puppet Roman Emperors after the Crisis of the Third Century (which by historical happenstance took place only a few decades after the events here), meaning that control of the military is paramount, and to be a successful general is almost synonymous with being a potential imperial claimant yourself. Many years later during the Yuan dynasty, in fact just as Luo was writing the collection of plays that this novel was compiled out of, someone coined the saying that "the mountains are high and the emperor is far away" as a way of highlighting how notional autocracy and practical independence can coexist simultaneously in the vastness of the Chinese landscape when a failing dynasty surrenders power to the court bureaucracy and a succession of generals.

Military strategy is also pretty thought-provoking, both for its realism and for its more whimsical moments. Many novels, even ones that make real efforts at military realism, often skimp on mundane details, like the importance of supply line logistics, the need to post sentries at night, how important the disposition of your troops are in pitched battles, or the finer points of besieging cities. Often lazy authors will describe their heroes as strategic geniuses, but leave the actual demonstrations of their acuity up to the reader's imagination. Not here! All the ingredients of military prowess are on full display, with Cao Cao in particular shown as a true mastermind of deception and consistently able to turn seemingly any setback into an opportunity thanks to his cleverness and willingness to listen to sound advice. The sheer quantity of his cunning feints and countermoves would be truly impressive even if they weren't (mostly) based on real history; both his wit and his opponents' foolishness are very convincingly rendered, as Luo also faithfully depicts the many ways that superior forces can be defeated by a leader's ill-timed vacillation, inconvenient bouts of drunkenness, stubbornness and inflexibility, or by just plain better tactics and superior hustle.

The flip side is that all of the major characters are all invincible superheroes with plot armor that would make the most hack fanfiction writers blush. Take a drink every time one of the protagonists kills an opponent with a single mighty blow, or fights through a crowd of enemies miraculously unscathed, or gets out of a jam by the impossibly convenient arrival of reinforcements just in the nick of time, and in just a few chapters you will be drunker than Zhang Fei himself! It's one of the fictional scenes, but when Guan Yu slays a series of six generals on a single journey to reunite with Liu Bei, it feels like you're reading a novelization of the Dynasty Warriors video games, which are based on this material, and not the other way around. Even when a main character finally dies, it's invariably in a protracted, grandiose boss battle. And yet somehow the comic book-like action sequences, or the occasional appearances of magic, never feel out of place or untrue to the broader story, as malefactors like Dong Zhou appear and then are vanquished according to the inscrutable dictates of the heavens as well as the familiar laws of villainous peril and heroic resolution.

And thanks to Luo's consistent editorializing to let you know who's good and who's bad, the main characters are all memorable and sympathetic to the point where you can't help but get emotionally invested in their fates like the worst kind of nerd fanboy. Luo's obvious cheerleading for Liu Bei and his oath-brothers Guan Yu and Zhang Fei comes off as almost charming, even though I can't be the only person who got a bit sick over how exaggeratedly noble and virtuous Luo makes him appear at every opportunity. And by the same token, Cao Cao really doesn't seem like as bad a guy as Luo tries to paint him; not only is he the smartest guy around and sincerely reluctant to seize the throne illegitimately, he consistently tries to persuade his enemies over to his side and forgive their past enmities whenever possible. His occasional ruthlessness is of the "it's all in the game" variety, and his "big transgression" of honestly taking credit for killing the deer on the royal hunt when the Emperor missed it is so laughably petty that, when the rest of the imperial court flipped out, I wanted him to just take power right then and there. We're reminded that the Han dynasty is rotten and corrupt every single chapter; might as well let someone with some talent take the reins. I'm firmly on Team Cao Cao, for now at least.

I can't imagine anyone reading this far and not continuing to the next volume as quickly as humanly possible.

Book Review: Philip K Dick - Our Friends From Frolix 8

I began reading this book just as the "Operation Varsity Blues" college admissions scandal story broke, and in confirmation of the unspoken rule that "all politics is in Philip K Dick somewhere", the very first chapter involves the main character's son having his score on an admissions test invalidated so that the rule of the elite can continue unabated. Fittingly, this is one of his more political novels, and yet one of the few with a happy ending. I liked it, but with the caveats appropriate to its minor-tier status.

The basic setup of the novel involves a future Earth with 3 types of people: the Old Men, who are normal humans; the New Men, who have much higher IQ; and the Unusuals, who have mutations like telepathy. The latter two groups, though vastly outnumbered by ten thousand to several billion, rule society via a combination of natural superiority and outright fraud, such as changing test scores to lock even promising Old Men out of the upper echelons of power. Protagonist Nick Appleton, a more-or-less typical PKD stand-in, is an Old Man with the almost Onion-esque crap job of "tire regroover"; when the tires of flying cars get low on tread, he etches new grooves on them, which also cuts them dangerously thin. Life sucks in this class-stratified society with omnipresent government surveillance where both alcohol and subversive literature are banned, but there is hope - one dual New Man/Unusual, Thors Provoni, stole a prototype FTL spaceship 10 years ago and is rumored to be returning to Earth in the company of an alien power who will upend the corrupt social order.

I hadn't read any PKD in a while, so it was striking to see the relative absence of reality-questioning and simultaneous increase in politics here, especially against such a relevant backdrop as the college scam stuff. Anti-government themes are to PKD as murders are to Agatha Christie, of course, but there's an uneasy model of politics here, as developed in the plot: both an alien and a renegade Unusual/New Man were required to break up the oligarchic tyranny of the New Men and the Unusuals (who are so entitled that one government official spends an inordinate amount of time trying to steal the protagonist's side chick), but the alien itself, the titular Friend from Frolix 8, is a pure MacGuffin, a sideshow who doesn't even show up until the second half of the book, and vanishes almost immediately after landing on Earth and shifting the balance of power by psychically removing the powers of the elites (excepting Provoni?). The book ends with the Old Men establishing rehabilitation camps for the newly depowered and infantilized Unusuals and New Men, but it's not a very satisfying ending, since we don't see what the new future is actually like. Is the alien going to swallow up all independent life on Earth or not? Childhood's End this isn't. I won't torture the novel to produce allegories for the real world, but I was struck by the helplessness of the majority to change anything about their world, and subsequent reliance on the mutant and the alien.

Also notable for me were PKD's trademark issues with pacing (major life decisions are made almost instantly for odd and seemingly implausible reasons, meanwhile important backstory is delivered in expository chapters while nothing is happening) and his equally signature idiosyncrasies with women. There's an unintentionally revealing internal monologue late in the book delivered by Police Commissioner Gram, the aforementioned official trying to steal Nick's side chick Charlotte, who Nick suddenly abandoned his wife Kleo and several children for after having known her for several minutes:

You brought Charlotte to your apartment, made up a lie as to how you got involved with her, and then Kleo found the Cordonite tract, and blam, that was it. Because it gave her what a wife likes best: a situation in which her husband has to choose between two evils, between two choices neither of which is palatable to him. Wives love that. When you're in court, divorcing one, you get presented with a choice between going back to her or losing all your possessions, your property, stuff you've hung onto since high school. Yeah, wives really like that.

And a few chapters later, Gram reflects further on his sudden lust for this young woman, who like Nick he has known for essentially no time at all:

That's the trouble with being that age, he reflected. You idealize the whole woman, her self, her personality… but at my age it's simply how good a lay they'd make and that's that. I'll enjoy her, use her up, teach her a few things she probably doesn't know about sexual relations – even though she's 'been around' – that she hasn't dreamed up. She can be my little fish, for example. And once she learns them, does them, she'll remember them the rest of her life. They'll haunt her, the memory of them… but on some level she'll be yearning for them again: they were so nice. Let's see what Nick Appleton, or Denny Strong, or whoever gets her after me, will do to gratify that. And she won't be able to force herself to tell him what it is that's the matter.

Hmm. Somewhat redeeming all this is the presence of perhaps the best awful sex scene in all of PKD's oeuvre a few chapters later. Immediately after the police have murdered her ex-boyfriend Denny Strong, Charlotte takes Nick to Central Park in Denny's car and flatly tells him they're going to have sex. She starts removing his clothes at the verbal equivalent of gunpoint, he tells her she has small breasts, and he starts babbling about Yeats, statutory rape, and Denny while trying to put his clothes back on. Didn't he just abandon his entire family for her, and hasn't he been fighting the equivalent of the head of secret police for the entire planet over this girl? Clearly PKD was working through some of his own marriage issues via Charlotte (the very year after this book was published his wife left him), but it's distractingly unsubtle to read. Additionally, the focus on police reminded me of the far superior treatment he would provide 5 years later in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; this is essentially the last of the amphetamine-fueled pulp novels that he cranked out at unhealthy velocity.

And yet throughout you're reminded constantly why you're reading PKD, who can transform even the roughest pacing, plotting, and characterization into a memorable science-fiction vision of desperate politics and thought-provoking prognostication. The book's recurring conceit that in the future alcohol will be all but outlawed yet pharmaceutical cocktails are eaten like candy and opium is universally consumed is funny, and there's an interesting throwaway reference to J.W. Dunne's An Experiment With Time, a 1927 discussion of precognitive dreams which obviously had a large influence on PKD's own work as well as several other famous sci-fi authors. The horror of the power of the alien is delivered with a nearly Stephen King intensity, yet as the potential of the alien power to transform human society into an equitable, open, and loving world are delightful passages that show his gift for the right imagery at the right time:

Your race is xenophobic. And I am the ultimate foreigner. I love you, Mr. Provoni; I love your people… insofar as I know them through your mind. I will not do what I can do, but I will make them know what I can do. In your mind's memory-section there is a Zen story about the greatest swordsman in Japan. Two men challenge him. They agree to row out to a small island and fight there. The greatest swordsman in Japan, being a student of Zen, sees to it that he is last to leave the boat. The moment the others have leaped out onto the shore of the island he pushes off, rows away, leaving them and their swords there. Thus he proves his claim for what he is: indeed he is the finest swordsman in Japan. Do you see the application to my situation? I can outfight your establishment, but I will do so by not-fighting... if you follow my thought. It will be in fact be my refusal to fight – yet showing my strength – which will frighten them the most, because they cannot imagine such power held but not used.

A hopeful vision of power like that is all too rare in PKD's novels, and so while this is neither his most technically accomplished nor intellectually adventurous novel, it is a worthy entry all the same.