I guess I’ll have to add a category of “food” to the sidebar since I have found multiple opportunities to gush about it.
By the way, this is my first post from my new Macbook. I had tried before but Wordpress wanted a password! Password? I didn’t remember having a password. You know how you build them in and then don’t know what your username and password were? That happened. But I went back to the PC (thank goodness I still have it, too) and dug deep into the site and found what it was. So I am gradually migrating to the Mac as my primary computer. So far, so good.
Now, back to food.
Mark left town Wednesday for a rendezvous with his first love: Drums. It’s a big music convention and he gets to fondle the newest and prettiest drums. He’s had fun. He’ll be home today. When he leaves town, I have a great opportunity to eat the way that I should. When he’s here, we order pizza, we go for Mexican, we snack on cheese and crackers. Get him out of the house and I can go back to my preferred diet of salads and carrot sticks and whole grains, right? No, I went for fried chicken!
I had a meeting up north yesterday afternoon. I had been up north earlier in the week and drove by the Top Notch Hamburger ______ (”joint”? “stand”? just “restaurant”?). Whatever you want to call it (I think “hamburger stand” works best), I wondered why I’ve never eaten there, or at least haven’t eaten there since the early 70s with my cousins on a visit to Austin. It’s famous for having been in the movie “Dazed and Confused” and yet I haven’t eaten there in our years in Austin and I never used it as a “Let’s Learn About Austin” question. I have wasted a lot of time!
The interior decor is so 70s. It made me miss my smocktops and shirtjacs and midi dresses and platform shoes. I LOVED those styles. I ordered fried chicken, not because I am simply rebellious and didn’t want to order a HAMBURGER at Top Notch HAMBURGER, but because it looked like fried chicken was a specialty and I have been craving more fried chicken since our trip to Sweetwater. Just as I hoped, the fried chicken was “real” fried chicken, on the bone, lightly battered and absolutely delicious. I had the two-piece white meat and the wing was big, but the chicken breast (and pulleybone) was monstrous! So good. Maybe I’ll start doing some job-hunting on the north side so I can make this place a regular stop!
The side dishes were cole slaw (good) and fries (okay) and Texas toast (good). I wished i had some cream gravy for the toast, but I didn’t ask like I should have. I saw someone else later with a bowl of cream gravy so I could have had it, too. The onion rings and hamburgers looked great, too, and I read online that the malts are the best, so there will have to be another trip across the river one of these days. It took 45 minutes to get back to my part of town, so it might be easier to go find good fried chicken in San Marcos or Dripping Springs. Another cool thing about the Top Notch was that they had curb service. I didn’t see the “car hops” but they had the menu boards like Sonic and people were sitting in their cars so I suppose they were being served out there.
I am an eavesdropper when I am out in public and there was an interesting family at the Top Notch. An older mother, two grown sons, and a daughter-in-law, I deduced. I think they had just been to a funeral. They really had that air of “old Austin” and I swear I have seen the woman before. I think she is a philanthropist, or a friend of Lady Bird’s, or a politicians widow, or something along those lines. I kept listening hard, hoping she would give me a clue like “As I always said to your father, John Connally . . . ” She reminded me a lot of Nellie Connally, but since Nellie has passed away, I can’t quite figure who she was. Lovely woman, lovely family. Plenty of money, but prefer to eat at the Top Notch. I want that to be me! Well, I guess it is, isn’t it?
The meeting I went to before I ate at the Top Notch was with my Spasmodic Dysphonia support group. It isn’t very formal, just a four-time-a-year get-together with other folks that have the same neurological disorder that I have that caused all of my vocal troubles in the past couple of years. It is wonderful AND scary to meet these people. This time more wonderful than the last (and only other) time I met them. That experience was scary because so many of them were having a very difficult time with their voices that day and it was a struggle for them to talk and a struggle just to listen. It was a vision of what is to come in my life. Yesterday, though, most of the folks that came (about ten) had had their Botox treatments recently and were in good voice and it was only difficult to hear because I’ve listened to a lot of rock music in headphones in my life and because the Central Market Cafe is so noisy. They are nice people and it is, for me, so nice to talk to people that know what I mean when I say I’ve had a good-voice or a bad-voice day. One of these days I will write my whole story about the voice troubles and the effects it had over the last three years (like losing a job?). If you know of someone that struggles to talk or always sounds like they have allergies, and they say they have to gasp to breathe, I hope you will have them Google “spasmodic dysphonia” or get in touch with me. I’ve directed a lot of strangers to my doctor and toward a diagnosis in the last couple of years. Some people spend years not knowing why they are struggling. I was fortunate to get a diagnosis a year after it all began, and that was probably the longest, most stressful year of my life.
Okay, so today. Football. And then more football. I expect Green Bay and New England to be in the Superbowl in two weeks, so that means I will be rooting for New York and San Diego today, but I don’t really care. But, yes, I care enough to watch!