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 Haupt wrote this in 2013, but it's not out of date in any way that matters, and though sadly many of its more dire prophecies have been fulfilled since its 2013 publication (RIP Players and Hill's, at least for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.