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Food

Austin Restaurant Customers Are 'Keeping It Weird' For All of Us

People are worried about Austin getting too 'yuppified,' but I'm here to tell you that this town is still full of crazy people.
Photo via Flickr user Davidlohr Bueso

Not that long ago, a woman recently called ahead to the restaurant that I was working in to ask, "I need to know if I can bring a service animal into the restaurant." Obviously, of course you can bring in a service animal—so long as you bring in the proper paperwork to show it's legit. But when she arrived—no fucking shit—she brought a giant two-foot-cage in with a talking parrot inside and the paperwork to back it up. Apparently, she suffers from extreme anxiety and some sort of depression disorder that requires her to cart around a caged parrot that gives her compliments. Our waiters had to listen to this parrot chatting with this lady, giving her compliments throughout her entire meal, as they dropped off different plates of food. I wish I was making it up.

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I was born and raised in Austin, Texas. I still live and work here as a full-time pastry chef. We have this hometown slogan, "Keep Austin Weird," a phrase that's been used to reflect our native weirdos, from the beloved (and now deceased) homeless man, Leslie Cochran, to Willie Nelson, to our democratic stance in the midst of the right-wing stronghold over our state as a whole. But I think that a lot of locals in Austin are having fears that Austin is getting too yuppified, that too many transplants might tamper with our Southern crazy. Luckily, I can firmly state that our clientele in the downtown dining scene is keeping things super weird for our Texan community.

Photo via Flickr user Megan Ann

RIP Leslie Cochran. Photo via Flickr user Megan Ann.

Over the past five years, the Austin food scene has been bursting with incredible talent around town, from the Uchi family, Ramen Tatsuya, Barley Swine, Justine's, Swift's Attic, Olivia's, Qui, Dai Due Supper Club, Parkside, Bufalina Pizza, Easy Tiger Bakery, Lenoir, Elizabeth Street Café—the list goes on and on. We've got an incredible source of restaurant patrons at these establishments who maintain a sane level of interactions with the staff, but no one quite compares to the crazy customers that I've come into contact with in Austin's downtown restaurant scene.

Every year, I almost lose my mind at the thought of throwing myself back into the downtown nightmare that is Sixth Street—Austin's equivalent of Bourbon Street—and think, This is a brilliant plan, let's keep working downtown, but I guess I'm a glutton for punishment.

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Here's what you need to know if you've never been here: Downtown Austin is a total shitshow because there's a giant homeless shelter directly in the middle of all of the nightclubs and bars scattered about the area. What results is a sloppy mixture of frat boys—a bunch of college kid douchebags—who want to go out and party at bars on 6th, some crackheads, and a couple of quality restaurants that sober people actually want to eat in the midst of all of that, and you're like, "Well, let's invite them all in to eat! This is gonna be really fun."

People tend to head downtown and think it's a party town, so they're always sloppily wasted. A perfectly normal human being was sitting at the bar in the restaurant I was working in directly on Sixth Street and threw up two separate times directly onto the restaurant floor. He continued to eat his meal as if nothing ever happened. We'd all stare out from the kitchen like, "You just barfed on the bar and don't even care. What is wrong with you?"

At one restaurant that I worked at for a few years, we had a front-of-house manager who managed to have everything bad that could ever happen to anyone on the planet always happening to him. I think he was cursed. One Friday evening, one of the customers—apparently the chief financial officer from a very well-known software company here in town—sat at the bar with (what became very evident) a hooker, and proceeded to beat her up in the middle of the restaurant. Our manager politely approached them and asked him to leave. It erupted into a brawl outside on the street because there were some frat boys who thought that he was involved in the beating of said hooker, which turned into the kind of fight that the cops had to break up.

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Even though I work in the back-of-house, I've witnessed servers getting tips in the form of drugs like Molly. A few years ago, there was a well-known drug dealer around town who sat down in a booth to eat dinner and he accidentally—how cute!—left a full clip from a gun when he got up to leave. It ended up in my house for a minute, and then I threw it out.

Last week, I was walking down Congress Street to pop into the corner store when I noticed a woman—who appeared to be normal—with what I thought was dirt on her face. Without thinking too much about it, I said, "Excuse me, ma'am, you have some dirt on your face," and she started screaming at me, "It's Ash Wednesday, you devil worshipper!" For the next two blocks, she followed me down the street, screaming. I spotted her the following day eating lunch at a nearby restaurant while wearing a trash bag on top of her pants.

A bunch of my friends work at a five-star restaurant that's on the national restaurant map radar. To this day, they literally have to employ police officers in their parking lot because crazy things can happen, like people-cracking-beer-bottles-on-others'-heads type of shit. Granted, it's out of the territory of downtown Austin, but the insanity that has taken place there is worthy of mentioning. On one particularly average night of service, there was a regular and sober-looking 45-year-old woman who got up at the end of her meal to leave restaurant. She was topless upon her exit.

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The entire kitchen staff was in complete shock.

But when I consider the truly bizarre things that have taken place in the Austin restaurant scene, it all goes back to the night that a seriously intoxicated couple, who were both in wheelchairs, requested a cab after their meal. Since they were drunk and impatient, they told the manager who was standing outside with them, "Fuck it, we're not waiting for this cab," and decided to wheel off down South Lamar, an incredibly busy and dangerous street.

South Lamar is a hill.

Imagine two people in wheelchairs rolling down this terrain into oncoming traffic. The manager was trying to chase them down so that they wouldn't die.

Nevertheless, the story that continues to confound me above all others is one that took place at the five-star restaurant. A double date came into the restaurant for dinner one evening and sat down in a booth. After they had finished their meal and left the restaurant, the waiter discovered—on the side of the table where one of the women was sitting—a giant turd. All of the restaurant workers were looking at it, completely dumbfounded. How does one defecate (discreetly) in a nice restaurant and even manage to leave it there are the end of the meal like a bad tip? Are you really trying to tell us something, or are you having a mental breakdown?

Most of these stories don't blow my mind anymore, because something odd typically happens at least twice a month at any of the above mentioned restaurants, but I will never be able to understand the kind of person who needs a bird to shower you with compliments during mealtime. God help us all.

As told to Helen Hollyman.

Watch Callie's episode of Munchies: Chef's Night Out.