How far will they drive to eat your food?

Steve went from selling wristras of chilies 🌶 on the side of the road to being a multi-millionaire in a very short amount of time.  Steve Smith was a true-blue entrepreneur and created a long-distance service in the model of the pyramid scheme, it was as close to a pyramid scheme as the U.S.Courts would allow.  He made a healthy living from the sales and then made millions of dollars when he sold his venture to a Canadian telephone company. At the time of the sale, he lived in Vineyard Bay off of Ranch Road 620and being so very close to our restaurant, we were his everyday diner.  Clearly, he spent money like it was water as our prices were categorized as $$$$. 

He and his entourage were watching CNN and they caught a romantic story being aired about the west Texas town of Lajitas.  Steve grew up in El Paso and had a love of the desert landscape, throw in the mountains of Big Bend and Steve was hooked.  The town was for sale and Steve was going to buy it, the rest is history.

Steve and his entourage had majestic plans for the sleepy desert 🌵 town.  Steve’s vision was to create a remote hideaway for millionaires from all over the world with all the luxury that money can buy and this included a long runway for jets with a bunk house for overnight pilots, a championship golf course, a driving range, employee housing, an equestrian center, a superior hotel, a gun/shooting range, a residential area with all underground facilities, great food and drink, a high-end RV park, the list goes on. 

Before WWII the area was alive with miners extracting mercury, which was used for bomb switches, then the transistor was invented and mercury value plummeted.  Mercury was like gold; the miners would follow the veins of ore deep into the earth and then put the ore into giant furnaces to melt the mercury out of the ore. There was a lot of easy money in mining the mercury and it was thought to be harmless, it was the 1960’s before it was proven that prolonged exposure to the mercury vapors caused mercury poisoning which come to find out affects the whole central nervous system and is deadly. Greedy locals made small crude smelters for the mercury extraction in their home ovens and lived and died and went a little crazy while living amidst these vapors.  The origin of the phrase “Mad as a Hatter” is believed to have come to be because hatters really did go mad as the chemicals used in hat making included mercurous nitrate, used in curing felt and furthermore quite often hat bands were sown around mercury and then sewn into the hats because it made the hats very pliable.  Anyhow, mining for mercury is a recipe for population control and you can now visit the ghost towns that were once alive with families, school houses, general stores, etc.  The original settlers may be long gone but,in their wake, there is still loads of that Wild West personality still alive in Lajitas and that feeling has appeal to many.

This small town, Lajitas, is along the Rio Grande River between Big Bend National Park and Big Bend State Park, just down the road from the ghost town of Terlingua, home of the famous Terlingua Chili Cook Off.  When Steve pulled into town,the only thing up and running in Lajitas was an old beat up hotel.  Everything on his list of attractions for the“rich and famous” needed to be built so he proceeded to spend money like he had just won the lottery, you know “build it and they will come”.  He had surrounded himself with people who were “YES” men who would do his bidding and it became obvious to me that many of the people that Steve surrounded himself with were after his money 💰, but Steve didn’t seem to care as long as they did his bidding.   The local population got a new reliable water system because to have a world class golf course you have to have world class grass and that takes a whole lot of water.  He installed a new power infrastructure, i.e. smart building technologies and modern power plant control systems, no expense was spared. 

My involvement was this, Steve owned everything and paid for everything but I was to be paid an hourly rate for my service and I was presented to the press and the public as an owner/investor who was committed financially and in for the long haul in order to add name recognition and some credibility and validation to the restaurant project portion of the property. 

I worked with a new up and coming Austin architect, Ryan Street who was young and eager and his restaurant design caught the eye of Architectural Digest and they did an article on the entire project. 

I had never worked with an open budget but I drank the “kool aid” and got on board with the “money is no object” mindset and built the best kitchen, dining room, and bar that money could buy.  The kitchen had a chef’s table, a dry aging cooler for the beef, and on and on with the frills. 

I created the menu similar to my restaurant in Austin, Hudson’s on the Bend, cook what’s in your backyard, which happened to be Old Mexico and a lot of cowboys, you get the idea.  For the menu development, I began to do research on what lives in the desert and we were 20 feet from the Rio Grande so there was lots of life, deer and antelope among a few of my finds.  I made my share of mistakes, javelinas being one.  When I first saw a family of javelinas, l thought they were a form of desert pig and being a pork lover, I thought what a tasty treat if cooked properly—WRONG they come from the rodent family.  That’s where I draw the line, no cooking rats,“you can put lipstick on a javelina, but it’s still a javelina”.  Bird watchers made Lajitas home base as hundreds of birds would migrate overhead; quail, duck and geese were among wildfowl that were in the area or at least stayed overnight.  Big Horn Mountain Sheep are native to the area and very impressive to watch as they scurry straight up the mountains, but sadly they are reputed to be tough and dry on the plate so we did not add them to the menu.  Any fish that you catch from the Rio Grande is muddy tasting so the only local seafood available was actually pond food, catfish out of the local pond. There was a salty well up around Fort Stockton and they were experimenting with shrimp farming, but I never followed up to see how that turned out.  Sysco Foods agreed to send us a truck delivery with good old Texas beef and such much to our far away and remote location once a week so we were safe opening a restaurant in the middle of nowhere. 

We opened with a fun little menu full of local Mexican and Cowboy influences and desert game.  On a busy night we would cook about 50meals. 

 I staffed the kitchen with a Hispanic couple that worked for me in Austin at Hudson’s and needed no training, Blas and Adelina Gonzales.  Hudson’s “want to be”waiter, Blake Baumgardner was promised a promotion from busboy to waiter if he agreed to move to Lajitas for a year and train the waitstaff.  Blake agreed and my core staff was in place.  John Siebels, the manager and cork dork from Hudson’s went to Lajitas for a brief stint to help with waiter training and to put together our wine list.  He did not have to be enticed to help, it was a little work vacation all rolled into one for him, he loved that part of the world.

We were only open a few months when I got a call saying the restaurant was on fire 🔥and it was a total loss.  Everyone wanted the restaurant rebuilt so it was quickly rebuilt.  The fire in Lajitas was started by a cotton mop stored next to the hot water heater. Meanwhile, back in Austin, we had a plumbing challenge in the women’s bathroom at Hudson’s and Sara Courington was on her way to retrieve the kitchen mop to clean up the bathroom and when she found the mop, it was propped up against the water heater smoldering.  Sara found the smoking mop on the very same day as the fire in Lajitas, coincidence, I think not.  It’s like the old restaurant joke“sorry to hear about the fire at your restaurant”, reply “Shhhh that’s tomorrow night”.

One of the reasons Lajitas became popular is the rock ledge in that stretch of the Rio Grande that made crossing in that spot of the river shallow and easy, appealing to smugglers of all types. This was before the world of borders and international travel changed after 9/11 occurred.  Marlboro cigarettes made several commercials there because as we all know, there is something undeniably romantic about puffing cowboys driving cattle across a river. Makes me want to light up.

There is a small town across the river called Paso Lajitas which is where the majority of our laborers came from with a stress-free commute wading across the river to and fro every morning and evening.  You could take a rowboat across the Rio Grande or rent a horse to ride across the river for authentic Mexican experience.

I did my part to be a gringo. Eat your heart out Robert Earl Keen.  The restaurant had a lookout tower and I flew the iconic Texas Independence flag that was an old timey cannon with the peril printed below “Come and Take It”.  One of my favorite Rio Grande memories is looking out at the river and there were two pickup trucks nose to nose in the middle of the Rio Grande with jumper cables going from one truck to the other,problem solving where ever it may be. 

Steve finally stopped throwing money at the project and sold the town at a fraction of what he spent and with that the money flow stopped and everyone went home. That’s the real story. The End.

Below you will find a chicken fried antelope recipe.  The red eye gravy is your standard cream gravy with coffee grounds added. I imagine the trail cook found nothing to flavor his gravy so he threw in a handful of coffee grounds or more than likely it was a culinary accident,the coffee grounds fell into the gravy. Cookie tasted it and approved.  You can use this for ALL chicken fried recipes, i.e. beef, venison, pork, chicken and of course all kinds of wild game.  Use a culinary hammer to tenderize and flatten. Remember the quality of the meat determines the quality of the end result. This recipe is for 4.

Ingredients

4 each 6-ounce filets of backstrap of antelope

2 tablespoons of your favorite rub

2 cups AP flour (seasoned liberally with S & P)

1 cup egg wash (1 egg whisked with 1 cup milk)

I quart vegetable oil (for frying)

 Method

Season the backstrap with your favorite rub.

Place each 6ounce filet under food film  pound/flatten until they are ¼ “thin.

Breading procedure, dust each filet in the seasoned flour. 

Dip the filets in the egg wash.

Dip the wet filets back into the flour.

Heat the vegetable oil to 325 degrees.

Place the filets in the hot oil. 

Make sure the oil maintains heat. 

The breading will absorb the oil and not be crisp if the oil cools below 300 degrees Fahrenheit.

Note: if you don’t have an oil thermometer heat the oil till it shimmers like a Texas blacktop road in summer.  Cook only 2 filets at a time to insure the temperature does not drop and become greasy.

RED EYE GRAVY

2 tablespoon light blond roux (equal parts butter & flour)

1 cup chicken stock (good quality)

1 tablespoon Worcestershire

1 tablespoon coffee grounds

2 cup half & half

Several dashes of hot sauce

Sea salt & pepper to taste

Method

In a sauce pan simmer the chicken stock to 2 tablespoons.

Add half & half, Worcestershire, coffee grounds & hot sauce.

Bring all to a simmer.

Thicken with roux, adding one tablespoon at a time.  Keep the gravy simmering as you whisk in the roux.  Keep warm until you serve it.

Remember to spill the gravy on mashers.ENJOY