Home for the Holidays Part 4: Tacos and Barbecue

Jamitto and Charm followed me back from Utah so that we could all hang out in Austin for a few days. As is customary, as soon as we got off the plane, we immediately went for Mexican food, in this case tacos. In my opinion, the best tacos around are made with barbacoa. Barbacoa is made by taking a cow’s head, baking it slowly for many hours and then scraping off and shredding the meat. Add a bit of salt and you’re in business. Barbacoa tacos are elegant in their simplicity and they epitomize everything a taco should be: a big pile of greasy meat barely contained by a tortilla. In recent years, restaurants like Chipolte have been championing the burrito as the basic unit of Mexican food. I got to say, I cannot condone the burrito. Sure, they’re nice in a pinch, when no other Mexican food is available, but they should be eschewed whenever possible. They get thing wrong right from the start with their big, torso-sized flour tortillas. I mean what the hell? First off, tortillas are mode of corn, end of story (well, actually, they’re made of masa, ground up corn that’s been soaked in lye). Secondly, tortillas should only be about the size of your hand. I don’t want a freaking edible blanket here or some kind of sleeping bag for meat. The tortilla is supposed to be a small platform on which meat rests. The meat should be barely contained by the tortilla (if you two opposite ends of the tortilla together, your taco is definitely questionable) and the whole unit should have very precarious structural integrity. Your best tacos fall about after you’ve eaten about ¾ of them. They’re finger food, but their not dainty. Your hands should be covered in grease and salsa by the end, and there should be a serious danger of ruining your shirt. Mexican food is not for the faint of heart, you have to be willing to get down and dirty. My favorite taco joint, La Mexicana, knows how to do it right and we visited it at least three times while Charm and Jamitto where in town. Its part restaurant, part bakery, part grocery store, part Western Union office, and part jeweler. On top off all that, it’s open 24 hours. You really couldn’t ask for anything else in a commercial establishment.

Charm and Jamitto’s visit, indeed much of my time in Ausin in general, was focused around eating. I continually ran into a problem resulting from my eating habits in Vanuatu. In Vanuatu, I generally eat only one actual meal per day (sometimes less) and I really only get a good meal, like one that I’m actually excited to eat, maybe once a week. This means, that when good food presents itself, I eat as much of it as humanly possible. We’re talking like eating myself to the point of immobility. Afterwards, I pass out on the floor and sleep for several hours. Now, I found it difficult to rid myself of this habit while I was in the US, which led to a problem because basically every meal I was eating was a good meal, so I was gorging myself three times a day and spending most of the rest of the time in a food coma. I also kept forgetting that, in the US, people expect you to do things after eating, so I often found myself trying to do such things as carry on a conversation, run errands, or drive while my eyelids were tending towards shut. I kept reminding myself to not eat as much at the next meal, but it never sunk in.

At the end of the week Ben, another friend from college, joined us in Austin and the four of us made a pilgrimage to Lockhart. Lockhart is a small town about a 45 minute drive from Austin and is home to some of the best barbecue in the world. Lockhart is a city devoted entirely to barbecue and the perfection of barbecuing technique. For many decades, Lockhart had been home to a pair of barbecue restaurants, each excellent and each owned by a rival family totally obsessed with barbecue. A little while back, there was a feud inside of the families related to some obscure nuance of barbecuing technique, which led to a schism and the establishment of a third barbecue restaurant owned by a splinter group of on of the original families. The net result is that there are now three excellent barbecue joints crowded into a town that otherwise has very little to recommend it. My personal favorite of the three is Smitty’s, which is where I directed my guests.

Upon entering Smitty’s, one is immediately struck by a wall of suffocating heat. This is due to the two giant smoking fires burning continually behind the counter. Sometimes, when the line is especially long, it snakes in front of one of these fires and one is forced to wait in the sweltering heat until the line progresses sufficiently for you to move into the clear. The serving counter is a plain wooden deal adorned only with a pair of scales and pair of cash registers. Directly behind this is a huge wooden chopping block for the slicing of meat. Behind this are the two large brick smokers, brick boxes with metal grates in them to hold the meat. The smoke from the smoking fires is drawn up through the boxes and vented through metal chimneys on the roof. The brick smokers are covered with large, hinged metal plates whose handles are connected to counterweight systems on the ceiling, which prevent them from slamming shut when opened to remove meat. The brick walls behind the smokers are covered in a thick layer of black soot. In some places the soot is so thick that it forms soot stalactites clinging to the ceiling or walls. When the smokers are opened, they reveal a cornucopia of briskets, ribs, and sausages. The counters are manned by a team of very sweaty guys whose t-shirts all sport too many grease stains to count. You order your food by the pound and it is presented to you on a sheet of pink butcher paper. Plates are for the weak. Attached to the serving room is a school cafeteria style eating area with tables and chair which, thankfully, is air conditioned. They’ve used their century of barbecue experience well here, and the brisket is melt-in-your-mount tender and greasy, the ribs have just enough seasoning on them to compliment their natural porky flavor, and the sausage is loose packed, spicy, and wonderful.

After we’d eaten enough me to become immobile, we were slated to attend my brother’s 13th birthday party. Apparently, paintball has taken hold as the party activity of choice among middle school boys. Paintball is one of the primal sports which appeals to everyone’s suppressed desire to shoot each other in the face. Although the concept sounds like the kind of thing that a bunch of middle-aged guys came up with one weekend while drinking beer and decided to assemble in their garage, the level of technology involved is a little ridiculous. Paint is encased in plastic capsules of a standard diameter (the manufacture of which is probably not trivial) and propelled through a barrel using compressed carbon dioxide. It’s a decidedly expensive sport to be pursued by middle schoolers with no source of income.

We checked in and were equipped with guns and face mask and led out to the court. My brother and his friends had already been playing for a while, but were excited at the prospect of having some larger people to shoot at. Now, being hit with a plastic ball full of paint isn’t entirely painless. This divides paintballers into two distinct groups: those hesitant to get hit and those not. I’d been paintballing a few times before when I was in high school, during which I generally fell into the former category. Now, however, having gotten a bit bigger and lived in the bush for a year, getting hit with a paintball didn’t seem like that huge a deal. My guests tended to agree with this sentiment as well, so the four of us had a good time charging startled middle schoolers, a strategy that work reasonably well because it’s intimidating, and also because paintball guns aren’t particularly accurate.

After paintballing, we cleaned up and headed to a restaurant called Chuy’s, a Mexican place which, for some reason, decided to go with a 1950’s Elvis theme. They serve excellent Mexican Martinis, which are basically margaritas with olives in them. They are awesome, not so much because of the olives, but because you get about three margaritas worth in one order. After dinner, we headed to 6th Street, where Austin keeps all of its bars and clubs. It was a scene remarkably like college, except everyone was a little older, thus making everyone look more ridiculous when they’ve had too much to drink. It was nice to be with college friends again, but it was somewhat short-lived. Jamitto and Charm had only been able to make it for a week, and Ben only a couple of nights, so everyone took off Sunday afternoon. The price, I suppose, of having a real job as opposed to living on an island in the South Pacific.

My vacation home ended a little over a week later and, as vacations often do, it felt too short. Being in Austin just felt so good. It was hard to put my finger on, what, exactly, I found most appealing about it, but it just felt like home. Despite my year in the jungles, I was still a city boy at heart and I knew I’d be glad to return to the US and to Austin the following year at the end of my service.