Even in Austin, our godless center of heathenry, there’s precious few places to get a decent bite past 11pm on a Sunday. A friend and I had a late night ahead of us, and we needed sustenance (preferably, I suggested, sustenance that was fried and dipped in garlic ranch sauce and that also used to be a yam).
So we headed over to the Original Kerbey Lane, which has never let me down for a late-night snack – unless it’s one of those weekends where all the UT freshmen bring their parents into town and, let’s face it, they only know the names of about three restaurants in the entire city. Kerbey and Magnolia fall on the front line.
Original Kerbey, of course, boasts a far superior dining experience to Campus Kerbey, where I believe they’ll sell you congealed rat’s milk for $8.99 and there’s your queso, kid. Also, the restaurant is an evacuated coal mine. So Original Kerbey has an actual “dining environment” and the food’s not bad either. They’ve also fully integrated their delicious crinkle-cut sweet potato fries as a full-time menu item, which means I’m there like a baby ratlet after mother’s milk.
I’ve also been meaning to take full advantage of the summer menu, with its “hey-you’re-basically-eating-a-gyro” lamb burger, fish tacos with avocado aioli (that’s a fancy word for “mayonnaise sauce”), and prosciutto-melon-arugula salad. The rotating seasonal menu keeps me coming back, sort of the same way a child support payment keeps coming back, or the vision of a little girl tossed across a parking lot by a slow-witted driver, her frame falling limp like a rag doll on the pavement, keeps coming back.
We sat down to nothing out of the ordinary. Our waitress was nice (if, in typical Kerbey Lane fashion, minimalist in her appearances. I consider it more of an aesthetic than an attentiveness issue), and the sweet potato fries were delicious as usual. I suggested to my dinner companion that we call them “Yum-Yum Yams,” and the stiff silence for the next 12 minutes wrung my insides.
Then the food came out and we ate it, and that was the end.
Except – did I forget to mention? – we had a visitor halfway through. Let me paint this for you: He was a dark brown, with six legs, antennae, and wings. And he flew right at us. At first I thought a small bird had gotten in the restaurant, he was that big. If we had gotten the chance to weigh him, I think he would’ve come out ahead of a Yorkshire terrier. We stood, prepared to slap the roach down with our napkins in case he flew back at us. It was Kafkaesque.
I don’t mean to be dramatic. I grew up in a house with five kids, and when we didn’t have enough toys to go around, we played with whichever family of centipedes or carpenter ants happened to be infesting us at the moment. But never while we were eating. Well, come to think of it, my little brother used to eat them. We used to give him a nickel any time he’d eat a beetle or spider or whatever happened to be in the room that day, but I think he just started doing it for fun after a while. We called him Creepy Crawly Joseph. Lil’ Joe’s not doing so well, these days.
Eventually our waitress appeared from the ether to knock down the roach with a broom. After two smacks, it looked like she’d done him in. She apologized and asked pronouncedly if the roach had flown into our food. We shook our heads.
“Is there anything else I can bring you?” she asked.
“The check,” we said. We were done with food for the night.
When she brought the check out to us, though, we noticed something curious:
This made me wonder: Does Kerbey Lane get enough flying roach – flying, not just regular! – traffic to warrant a special 10% discount button when they ring you up? It’s a nice gesture (though I might’ve angled for more than 10% – maybe more gets knocked off if the roach actually flies into your food) but kind of unsettling.
Bottom line It’s Kerbey Lane, and nothing I say is going to make them any less of an Austin mainstay. They made a sincere effort to deal with our problem, though maybe it’s a problem that flies their way a few times too often. And I guess it’s still better than the Campus Kerbey, where they actually serve crushed-up roaches for $7.99 and call it Nabil’s Mid-East Feast. Plus it’s not like this will make me stop going there. If something goes wrong at Kerbey Lane, kind of like if something goes wrong at Magnolia or Chuy’s or Trudy’s, it’s just one of those things where you shrug and say, “Oh, Austin” and watch the sun set behind 10 or so unfinished mixed-use condos.
Comments
Didn’t you say you went out to eat after eleven?? Why does the bill say 10:25??