the dystopian late-night dining experience
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.
