who is raising the ipad kids?
we shouldn’t be raising kids; we should be raising adults
A touch over five years ago, something magnificent happened that, until just shy of a year before, I hadn’t ever given real consideration towards the possibility of: on a cold day in February, my first daughter was born. In a methodically unwelcoming hospital room in Georgetown, Texas, a then uninitiated Alexander was transformed from a layabout recently-recovered stoner suffering from prolonged adolescence into a real adult with some undeniably real responsibilities. It’s an impossible task to make anyone who hasn’t had the experience of such a transformation understand the day-in-day-out nose to the grindstone mentality that you have to adopt in order to successfully raise a child. You’ll have plenty of people who swear that they get it because they have a puppy or something, but anyone with more than a handful of functioning brain cells can make the assessment that this is a false equivalence. There were days that my former partner and I were truly made to reckon with the gravity of our decision to start a family by way of every aspect of our lives increasing dramatically in its level of difficulty. If anyone without prior experience with infants can happily imagine themselves waking up four to seven times every night for diaper changes, feedings, and paranoia-induced sporadic crib checks to make sure your kid is still breathing to then get out of bed and get two sips into your morning coffee before the nine pound behemoth that caused the need for caffeine that you were attempting to satiate in the first place started crying, you’re out of your fucking mind as far as I’m concerned.
That said, I wouldn’t have traded it for anything. Despite the fact that mine and my former partner’s respective mental healths were deteriorating to an all-time-low, there was an indescribable beauty in the madness that we were collectively experiencing. Just as we were starting to catch a rhythm, a mere fourteen months later, my child’s mother and I were rewarded for our tireless work in the field of child-rearing with an opportunity to raise the proverbial difficulty level of our lives with - you guessed it - another daughter.
To any curious party, I’ll give you a little tidbit that we learned: having a second child does not make the experience of being a parent twice as hard because having two children is *exponentially* harder than having just one. The difficulties and hardships we would face would soon inspire me to get a vasectomy in what I could later call a preemptive protest to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but at the time was just insurance that I would never again do anything to continue spreading myself too thin to be an adequate father to the children I already had. Over the course of the years that would follow, we learned a lot about parenting and about each other which would eventually culminate into the two of us separating and starting from square one as we figured out how to coparent.
I’m happy to say that the two of us are now successfully divorced people who still love each other platonically and have a beautiful relationship that is the polar opposite of what I saw in the divorce and subsequent custody litigation that my parents put my siblings and I through which ultimately led to my estrangement from both of them. I’m immensely proud of us for doing what we did and always prioritizing our childrens’ happiness and wellbeing and, this month, we’ll be seeing both of our daughters off to school for the first time. The sheer terror that my former partner as well as both of our partners are experiencing as we prepare to watch our little bundles of joy begin to spread their wings a little is unlike any sort of fear that my fear and paranoia-prone brain has ever come across.
But you can’t control what you can’t control, right? I’ve long (hypocritically) maintained that there’s no sense in losing your head about the things that you have no power to change. In a world so pervasively damaged by the principal-agent problem, however, it’s very difficult to submit to the countless situations in which you’re not calling the shots. Frankly, sometimes I find it preferable to learn from the noble ostrich and just stick my head in the sand rather than torture myself over my lack of agency. So in that spirit, my childrens’ mother is now turning to another train of thought: what is she going to do with all of this free time while they’re in school? What will navigating the world child-free feel like? I’ve had a better perspective on this over the last couple of years since, post-divorce, my children’s mother is the primary custodian of the children which has left me able to continue working overtime, but also have more free time during the day before I go to work to navigate the world perceived as something I never had the chance to be: a fully functioning, childless adult. Please don’t read any regret into those words; I love my children with everything that I have and I would give just about anything to be able to switch places with their mother and have them full-time instead, but that’s just not the reality at this juncture.
The aforesaid time I’ve spent looking from the outside in for once has been…enlightening. I’ve never been so justifiably put off by the behavior of parents than I have been since spending time in an area far less frequented by children than my previous dwelling of the family-friendly Round Rock, Texas. While I do understand to an extent some of the frustrations that parents in the city center experience not being catered to whatsoever, it is very difficult to deny that a lot of these frustrations come from the simple fact that parents are infuriatingly adamant about protecting their children from the real world to the point of not allowing them to integrate into it. If there is a single thought that could summarize the ideology that has guided the way my children have been raised, it is that, as a parent, it is not your job to coddle children so much as it is to teach your children how to be good adults and you should treat them as such. I’m far from the world’s foremost expert on how to raise children and I have not yet seen proof of concept in my efforts, but I do know one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt: my children know how to sit politely at a dinner table with adults, try anything that’s put in front of them at least once, and engage with adults who may speak to them without a fucking iPad in front of them better than most kids I encounter on my escapades about town.
I’m all for letting kids be kids, but that simply cannot be allowed to detract from the end goal of making sure the future generations are polite and well-adjusted to the various trials of adulthood that they will inevitably face. Take the iPad thing for example; does nobody else see a problem with just setting your child in front of a screen every time they go to a restaurant? Would we think it socially acceptable for a grown adult to exhibit this same behavior? What do we think of the grown adults who pull out their phone to watch a sports game of some sort at the dinner table? Do we look upon them favorably? I’m well aware that some developmentally-challenged kids/kids with learning disabilities get a bit of an exception with this because these modern conveniences provide relief for parents that need relief in whatever capacity that they’re able to get their hands on it, but let’s not pretend that these kids make up more than an infinitesimal sector of the children plugged into a screen you see out in public. Like it or not, parenting is a job that you have to be committed to a hundred percent of the time and that includes taking advantage of putting your children in social settings and setting an example for them as to how they should be conducting themselves. I shudder to think of how well-adjusted these kids have the capability of being after subjugation to such attention and effort starvation as this.
Sadly, this isn’t an isolated example and, as someone who works with the public for a living, I’m regularly tasked with tackling these behaviors. From parents who would rather argue with their restaurant servers about the fact that a $100 a person restaurant doesn’t have a robust kids menu as opposed to doing the work to make their children expand their horizons to parents who would let their children literally run around a bustling restaurant instead of deprive themselves of their own comfort, there are countless examples to account for that show sacrifice as a value parents are widely losing touch with. We can’t blame the kids for their parents’ fear of challenging themselves, but eventually, these children will walk amongst us as members of society. Where do we draw the line of judging adults who watch football games on their phone while eating dinner with their family between a child who was deprived of an earnest effort in being taught the subtle art of socialization and an adult who never recognized that they’re displaying socially unacceptable behavior?
Those questions are above my pay grade. Frankly, I’m a person who’s prone to making snap judgements about people in the first place so perhaps the answer is just to shut up and not lament about issues that won’t have any true bearing on my own life. That said, I can’t help but wonder how these behaviors may manifest themselves into other areas of social ineptitude. Obviously I don’t have any way of knowing this to be true, but I suspect that being deprived of opportunities to interact with others in your developmental years will rear its head in some way that will be more difficult for me than the act of rolling my eyes when I see parents at the table next to me plugging their kids in so that they can enjoy their wine without the burden of raising their children.
Like these parents, I also possess fear regarding my children, but unlike them, I’m not afraid of having to acclimate my children to the world in potentially difficult settings so much as I fear what kind of a world and its inhabitants that previous generations are setting them up to grow up with. The same reasons that I’m afraid to send my children to school (well, there are other reasons too) also motivate me to engage with them more thoroughly when I do have the opportunity to teach them what I know about the world by way of experiences and conversations. I imagine that in less than a year, I’ll have to explain to my daughters what TikTok is because some brilliant mind will have thought it beneficial to put an iPhone in the hands of some other kindergartener they go to school with. It’s not telling them that they’re not getting smartphones until they’re teenagers that I’m dreading so much as I’m apprehensive about how adept I’ll be at drawing the line between sheltering them from the bad habits that my peers have normalized with their children and giving them the space to figure these things out on their own.
In general, I think that fear is an effective, but ultimately unhealthy motivator for just about anything. My children mean the world to me and I’m sure that even the parents who I’ve been lambasting here would share the same sentiment. It is because I love them so much that I’m not going to let my fears about the world become obstacles for my children to move through as they grow up and I would encourage other parents to not let their fear of being challenged by their children’s behavior become the reason why they take the easy way out when it comes to raising them.
I don’t expect to change anyone’s parenting philosophies. If you’re already an iPad parent who lets their kids eat chicken nuggets for every meal, I probably haven’t changed your mind about this behavior, but in the off chance that I did you more than likely wouldn’t even know where to begin making a course correction and I can’t really help you rip that bandaid off. That said, if you’re currently childless but expecting a child in your life at some point, I would plead with you to not take the path of least resistance and to instead invest your time and energy into making sure that your kid grows up to be someone you would want to hang out with rather than just some appendage that you’re dragging around. I was fortunate enough to have adopted this mindset when my children were still young enough so that I can now take my girls to a daddy-daughter date at the bar top of Odd Duck when I have the resources to splurge and have them eat ceviche, falafel, and quail without complaint or distractions. I want a world in which children aren’t burdens to a young parent’s attempts to be young but rather a part of it that can supplement an already enriching experience byway of creating memories. I want my daughters to have great meals, be able to hold conversations with my friends, and enjoy a leisurely walk without the constant need for outside stimulus. Moreover, I want them to grow up and have their lives benefit from having been socially adept as long as they can remember.
Isn’t that what we all want?
the dystopian late-night dining experience
what does eating out look like past the hours when anyone cares?
Today feels like a good day to deliver some lighter fare than my usual pessimistic droning so without further ado…
Dear readers, I have a small confession to make.
Though I pride myself on my frequent visitation to the gym, my predilection towards eating chicken and rice at every conceivable opportunity, and an overall lifestyle that lends itself to a long, healthy existence, I too have a weakness: late-night eating. It would be easy to deflect fault; I could very easily blame my regularity towards a 1 AM meal on my job which I regularly don’t depart from until midnight or later. But I would be lying if I didn’t fess up to the simple truth: there’s just something so satisfying about a filling, late-night meal. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not actually one of those health-nuts that rallies against eating past a certain time - I truly don’t care what time myself, or anyone else for that matter, eats. The bigger issue at play here is almost certainly that late-night dining options are generally confined to the most unhealthy shit you can imagine. Let’s be honest: if you’ve made it to fourth-meal, you’re probably not feeling great about the prospect of cooking a full, nutritious meal for yourself either. So what are your options in my beloved city of Austin?
Well, in my experience, it’s kind of slim pickings. This wasn’t always the case before COVID, but a pretty major shift in the ability of restaurants to adequately staff their establishments since then has resulted in more limited hours. Short of Las Cazuelas and Whataburger, you may as well abandon the idea of a restaurant that’s open 24 hours; 24 Diner has become 16 Diner, Kerbey Lane has abandoned their ‘round the clock service, and Tyson’s Tacos is still a horrendously operated restaurant run by a rapacious human being. You may still find some late-night love from Seoulju till 1 AM, but nowadays, the new reality of late-night dining is either food trucks or, my preferred option, bars with restaurants on the inside such as Yellow Jacket Social Club, Frazier’s Long and Low, DelRay Cafe @ Nickel City, or my favorite underdog spot, Thunder Chief @ Lavaca Street Bar on South Lamar. You will never hear me disparage these establishments as they have done right by me on many a night during which my imbibement led me to the call of greasy, soulful bar food.
That said, I’ve recently taken up a somewhat more sober lifestyle for no other reason than to fit into my work shirts a little bit better. Frankly, I really shouldn’t be indulging in this sort of food anyways, but throughout the various peaks and valleys that I’ve experienced in my lifelong journey of attempting to get/remain in shape, I find that compromise and flexibility are two of the most crucial factors to be considerate of. This is so to say that if I’m willing to let my hungry brain indulge in some late-night eats, I should probably make the compromise and not booze it up while doing so. This is where my problem really kicks in with consideration to the fact that when I’m sitting at a bar, I want a goddamn drink and it’s pretty difficult to convince myself not to have that one drink that turns into three or four. It was through this dilemma that I found myself in the car with my partner after midnight, hungry after a long night at work, and unsure what to do about it. It was then that my beloved made a strange, but interesting proposition: “wanna go to IHOP?”
Y’all, in full transparency, I drive past an IHOP every day on my way to work and not once in recent memory had I considered the fact that this establishment is somehow the last bastion of 24/7, sit-down dining in this city. I had been late night once before recently, but that was a part of my efforts to avoid my family on Thanksgiving so I hadn’t even really fully realized that these hours weren’t just a fluke. But hell, I ate plenty of IHOP in my past life so why not give it a go now? I’m pretty acutely aware of the fact that you simply will not have a five star dining experience at 1 AM anywhere, much less an IHOP; I’m more than okay with this for the most part because, let’s face it: I don’t want to work a fucking graveyard shift waiting tables and I can only imagine that the servers doing so regularly will see their disposition wear down over time just as mine would. Who is your target demographic during after-hours? Stoners, teenagers, drunk people, and some combination of the three if I had to take a gander. Does that sound like the ideal clientele to inspire you to get up and after it every night? I’m going to go with a polite “no”. So that said, I went in with some pretty meager expectations.
Despite this, I couldn’t have prepared myself for the dystopian nonsense that I came to witness. My partner and I walked in and were greeted somewhat quickly by a woman in a promotional IHOP/Minions movie tee shirt who was certainly trying her best, but quickly took the opportunity when asked how she was doing to lament about how this was her sixteenth day without a day off which, understandably, led her to a feeling of pure exhaustion. She led us to a four-top booth in the corner which allowed us to have an unobstructed view of more cringey Minions promotional material, a table of three teenagers who were acting like they had all just tried alcohol for the first time, and an incoming parade of no less than twelve Uber Eats drivers coming to pick up orders in the forty-five minutes or so that we sat there. To my right, there was a table pamphlet advertising some sort of crypto-currency promotion that for some reason the executives of IHOP thought was necessary which only fueled my humorous interpretation of my surroundings. With no music playing in the background, we were serenaded by the sounds of the line cooks yelling at each other and the aforementioned teenagers making some inane commentary about whatever drama they were swept up in at the time. Outside, there were a couple of men yelling at each other as if we needed any assistance losing ourselves in the cacophany that we were embedded in at the time. In the private room that every IHOP has for some reason, the two servers on the floor were both on their phones demonstrating their justified apathy towards the strange and uncomfortable environment in the front-of-house. I don’t feel like I need to say this, but obviously if there was a manager of any sort on the clock, they were nowhere to be seen. There was nothing to complain about; I knew what I was signing up for walking in these doors at this hour. But I have to wonder how much about that situation would have been different if there was an employee on the floor whose job it was to give a shit? Maybe I could’ve gotten through my meal without having to watch a teenage girl under the table trying to wrestle her boyfriend’s phone out of his pocket.
But, you know what? I got two protein pancakes, two strips of turkey bacon, potatoes, and some egg whites that were edible after dousing them in hot sauce for $10 which was not only significantly cheaper than a comparable amount of food at a bar, but healthier by a mile. Was it as satisfying? Certainly not, but at this hour, you take what you can get in that department. The two of us departed feeling very strange about the whole thing, but once I got past the stupidity of minions and crypto, not terribly put off from doing it again sometime. The thing that I couldn’t shake, however, was how much this felt like staring into the future. I’ve always imagined that in some not-so-far-away time, cities will continue to diverge into increased disparity between the rich and poor. The areas that we working-class-folk patronize will start to look like the cities in Samurai Jack while the areas the rich live in will just look like progressively gaudier and more decadent versions of what they look like now. Within the walls of our parts of the cities, the places we eat will exude a similar type of anarchic spirit as I saw in the IHOP that day. Is this sort of thing just a calling card of the proletariat? Have I been spoiled by the fancier and more expensive spots in the city that I’ve dined at and worked at into thinking that an air of civility is necessary for a good dining experience? Am I a bougie prude who should view this sort of thing as more normal than I do? Is the after-midnight IHOP dining experience the future of casual dining?
As I consider these questions, I’m enjoying a sandwich at 1 AM in the comfort of my own home. Perhaps the anarchy of late-night dining is a warning to us all that we should be doing more of this and less of that. I think I’ll probably just make other concessions in my life to justify slamming a smash burger and irish nachos at Thunderchief for the most part, but sometimes, I ought to remind myself that I’m not as hoity-toity as I act like I am by putting down some 2 AM pancakes with the common folk. Colloquially, nothing good happens at this hour, but every now and again, you should poke your head out into the world and enjoy the chaos - you might learn something about yourself.
z’tejas and the death of the casual restaurant
enjoy your under $100 meals in austin because they won’t be around forever
I don’t think that I need to tell anyone who lives in Austin that there’s been a rapid growth occurring for years now that’s led to a complete paradigm shift in the culture and ethos of the city at large - if you live here, you feel it with every new condo that pops up, every celebrity and tech billionaire that moves here, and every demoralizing Zillow search you do in some futile attempt to make the dream of owning property here seem like less of a fantasy. In my world, however, there is no greater indication that the soul of the city is changing than what I feel when an institutional bar or restaurant closes. Don’t misunderstand me, not every restaurant closure is a tragedy that deserves to be mourned; for every great restaurant in this city, there are four restaurants that should be condemned - be it by the greater collective of consumers or, more often, by the health department. Though I am prone to these philosophical musings with or without any specific lighting rod to catch my ceaseless stream of opinions, on this specific occasion, we do gather here to mourn the loss of one of the greats.
Friends, today we say goodbye to Z’Tejas.
I know that there are still a couple of Z’Tejas location out there; hell, they’re about to open one in Kyle and they confusingly opened up another one in Avery Ranch across the street from where Moonshine took over the Z'Tejas that used to be there before the company famously plummeted into bankruptcy. But Z’Tejas in its original glory began on West 6th street in Austin, Texas on a strip of land now primarily owned by restaurant titans McGuire Moorman Lambert Hospitality, and it is here that we now see this great loss unfold in front of us. Relatively new owner of the enduring franchise, Randy Cohen, recently announced that due to the relationship between high rent prices on his primo West 6th street real estate and growing cost of overhead in an aging building, that he would be closing the original Z’Tejas location after 33 years in business at some undisclosed time in the next six months.
Now, if you’re anything like me, you may be thinking “how the hell did that old dinosaur even make it this long?” and that’s a great question that I only possess more of a hypothesis about than any evidence backed answer. See, Z isn’t the only Austin restaurant that began in that era that has survived off of the city’s bad habit of making an institution out of anything that has been around long enough to revive any notion of the great original Austin zeitgeist that countless corporations and real estate sharks have been trying desperately to capitalize on for decades. In the wake of COVID, I hired several late-blooming Z defects that told tales of labor abuse and hellish working environments that, assuming some good faith in their accounts, should’ve been enough to justify the end of this restaurant franchise much earlier than the slow burn of “success” in the business world that they continue to enjoy. I could name other restaurants that I feel similarly about, but I will refrain from doing so for the sake of peace keeping with my fellow service industry kinfolk. That said, due to my hyper-specific hospitality career, I have a tennous, but undeniable connection to the charming old relic that is Z’Tejas because I spent nearly a decade working for the man himself: original Z’Tejas executive chef, Jack Allen Gilmore; so one could say this one is a little different for me.
In 2012, a younger, less jaded version of me wandered into a hotel hiring center in Round Rock, Texas across the street from where my parents lived to apply for a job bussing tables at the highly anticipated second location of Jack Allen’s Kitchen in the aforementioned sleepy Austin suburb that would see considerable growth over the course of the following decade. During this time, I would become comically familiar with the lore of Z’Tejas since not only was nearly every member of the management and executive team a Z expat, but so were countless members of the staff who had been waiting for them to open a Jack Allen’s Kitchen closer to the Avery Ranch and Arboretum locations so they could also defect as their leaders all had. I would spend the next ten years opening and working at seven of their restaurants and learning everything I could about the business from these seasoned veterans as a busser, food runner, server, expediter, line cook, dishwasher, manager, and even a brief stint as a sous chef that we don’t talk about. My training was militant, intense, and highly rewarding. From these men and women, I learned everything that I needed to in order to spread my wings and leave earlier this year on to another opportunity with a young, promising restaurant group. But throughout all of this time, there was always a strange juxtaposition to reckon with that, in some ways, guided a lot of us who had cut our teeth with Jack and company to work harder: if this restaurant developed so many of their systems and practices from Z and been so successful with them, what happened to make Z so bad over the years and, furthermore, how do we stop ourselves from going down that same trajectory?
But what if I had been mistaken? What if my perceptions of this once reputable restaurant group had been pushed into a negative light more so because of my anecdotal experience than by any basis in reality? To be totally honest, I hadn’t ever considered that until very recently when upon hearing the news that the original location of Z’Tejas was closing, I decided to take my partner and my kids down to West 6th and enjoy a final bite at the old stomping grounds of so many from my old stomping grounds. My partner, also being a former member of the Jack Allen’s Kitchen brigade, was similarly ready to have a subpar experience in the name of reliving some nostalgic Austin classics. That said, the experience that we had there was… not at all what we were expecting.
When we walked in the shabby front doors of Z'Tejas on West 6th Street, we were greeted by a clearly busy, but otherwise, very friendly and accommodating server who promptly got us seated. Whenever I go to any restaurant, my restaurant manager brain is in full effect. I immediately start looking for any signs of the restaurant being dirty or disheveled and, though the place was clearly a bit old and out of shape, there weren’t any perceivable signs that it wasn’t at least getting some routine cleaning. The walls were lined with picture frames containing callbacks to a different time featuring lots of old staff/former colleagues of mine and an empty TV mount or two which definitely re-enforced the thought that “oh yeah, this place is definitely closing soon”. We were greeted by a lively and speedy server named Scotty who was confident and competent in a way that I hadn’t been led to believe existed in spaces such as these anymore. He got us our rounds of water and a topo chico for me to remind me that I’m not drinking right now and left us to our devices to laugh about how many very familiar dishes we saw on the menu that Jack had clearly been the architect of. But even our jaded career restaurant worker sensibilities couldn’t remove the shock we shared at how expedient everything was, how much greater the quality of service we received from Scotty was in comparison to that of which we’ve received at *much* nicer restaurants in the city, and most of all, how tasty everything we ordered was. After all was said and done, I was left feeling like everything I had believed about this place was wrong. Now frankly, I don’t really challenge that I was totally incorrect for most of that time - after all, I had eaten at one of these before and, even though it was some time ago, I know what kind of experience that I had. I do believe that when the new ownership took over a couple of years ago, that they probably had some sort of an effect on an uptick in quality.
So that begged the question: why then? Why was such a surprising, but well-known gem that had survived over thirty years in this city going under? I mean, I’m sure that they had sustained some injuries from a somewhat bad reputation they had taken on in previous years, but if my experience on this day was even somewhat reflective of the archetypal Z’Tejas experience, surely I wasn’t the only one who had some good opinions about the old relic. That question lingered only for a few more minutes when the check was dropped. For two appetizers, two quality kids’ entrees, two adult entrees, two topo chicos, and an iced tea, we were staring down the barrel of about $70 before tip. For those of us who are somewhat uninitiated, getting out of a restaurant with quality food and service for less than $100 is nearly unheard of in this part of the city. Up until this point, I couldn’t help but believe that the aforementioned reasons for closing this restaurant were being met by an unspoken intersection of a quality downturn driving away customers exacerbating the rising costs of rent and building upkeep. But on this itemized thermal paper receipt, I had not only a clear-cut answer to any question I had regarding the reason for Z’s death, but also, a confirmation of a fear I’ve had about the restaurant scene in urban areas for some time now: restaurants that charge these sort of reasonable rates can’t survive doing so in these areas and there is no longer a place in the sprawl of big cities for the mid-level restaurant.
On David Chang’s Hulu program, “The Next Thing You Eat”, he describes a future in which the mid-level restaurant has ceased to exist and instead, we diners of the world have hospitality culture that heavily enforces a line of demarcation between casual and fast-casual restaurants that exist in a lower price range and put a greater emphasis on delivery and carryout orders than on in-house service versus fine dining and casual-fine dining restaurants that are much more “experience oriented” and serve as the last bastion of the full-service hospitality experience that we currently know. While I think Chang makes a really solid argument the evidence of which is already presenting itself in the modern world, I think he missed a really key piece of the puzzle here, which is the fact that this will likely only apply to bigger cities. You’ll still be able to get your Red Lobster fix in Everytown, USA. We’ve already seen that corporate chain restaurants have been on a decline for years, but there will always be a demand for a relatively cheap, full-service, sit-down meal in smaller suburban and rural areas that we just don’t have in the heart of Austin. Other mid-level restaurants that remain steadfast survive off of a bustling to-go program or survive off of location like Hula Hut or Ski Shores, but in the coming years, you will see fewer and fewer exceptions to this incoming reality as more and more casual restaurants succumb to the reality that they will only entertain success if they commit to establishing themselves in sleepier parts of town.
As a career diner, this does sadden me. I’m no stranger to the higher-end, experience-oriented restaurant - hell, my partner and I both work in these types of restaurants nowadays - but, as a parent to two young children who I would like to raise to be competent and polite diners, I’m being afforded fewer and fewer opportunities to show them the right way without breaking the bank. This is just one more thing that puts the changing (read: wealthier) demographic in big cities at an advantage over we working class folks; while they get to enjoy the convenience and excitement of big city living, we’re being pushed into the outskirts and suburbs just so that we can attempt to continue enjoying any sort of quality of life without utmost regard for rent prices and $35 burgers.
Perhaps Z’Tejas is just a victim of circumstance in this regard. Perhaps anyone in my tax bracket is also falling victim to the rising tide that pushes us into the background. Perhaps I’m being hyperbolic and uncharacteristically nostalgic about a common restaurant closure. Feel free to draw whatever conclusion you feel appropriate, dear reader, but whatever you do, heed my premonitions and enjoy your Chili’s on 45th and Lamar while it still yet breathes - nothing lasts forever in this city, but the lifespan of the restaurant that has never seen a James Beard award is getting shorter and shorter with every day that passes. One day, you’ll have to drive to Buda to get onion rings at a sit-down restaurant, but for the time being, I’ve included a small list of mid-level restaurants that I like/love that you shouldn’t let the new face of the city trick you into forgetting about.
Cheers, y’all.