Nouveau Grub
Stephan Pyles and a passle of other innovative restaurateurs are putting their brands on a new dining experience: provocative, informal decor served up with stylish and healthy food, all at a fair price. Texans are eating it up.
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When making the rounds on any given evening in Austin, one is apt—no, one is certain —to come across a casually styled middle-aged man with a peppery beard, discussing golf and sex at the bar with other member’s of the city’s urban professional singles delegation. Architect Dick Clark has made his home in restaurants. He is part of a new Austin that has emerged over the past decade, equal parts bohemian and capitalist, upwardly mobile and nocturnal. “Even during the two times that I was married, my wives worked and so I often ate out,” Clark says, “which is partly why I try to design restaurants so that they can accommodate different moods under a single roof: spots where you can be cozy and intimate, bright spots where there’s a lot of heavy action, spots where the action is more subdued.”
Nouveau Grub requires a synthesis of efforts between the chef in the back of the restaurant and the designer in the front. Among the latter, Dick Clark personifies the crucial role that style has come to play in the Texas restaurant boom. In less than five years, Clark has become the reigning architect of Austin’s Nouveau Grub establishments. His sleek, uncluttered, and decidedly masculine desgins—Mezzaluna (and its San Antonio offshoot, Luna Notte), 612 West, and Bitter End, along with the redesign of Granite Cafe - look like no Austin restaurant before them. They seem custom-made for Clark’s scenesters and look more than a little forlorn without a proper cacophany. Clark owns a peice of most of them and—as a clever and fitting proviso in his contracts—eats his Nouveau Grub at a discount.
The interiors have garnered Clark loud praise and a detectable level of scorn. Yet the Nouveau Grub movement’s reliance on eye-catching ambience means that even those who consider his structures to be forbiddingly cold take his talents seriously and admit that Clark has become a player in Texas dining on the orderof the state’s superchefs. Indeed, Clark’s designation as architect appears on the menus at both 612 West and Bitter End, while the names of the highly respected chefs - Raymond Tatum at 612, Peter O’Brien at Bitter End - do not. Clark is not ashamed to be demanding this kind of attention. “Design isn’t of secondary importance anymore,” he says. “People are coming from all over the country to visit Austin, and you’re not going to lure them into a restaurant with a style that consists of hanging a few quaint antiques on a wall.”
Clark’s most audacious creation, 612 West, epitomizes the Nouveau Grub Ethic in that its theatrical design conveys a sense of lavishness despite the fact that the restaurant’s basic materials are cost-conscious: concrete floors, particleboard tabletops, plasterboard walls, a galvanized-metal bar top and a fireplace composed of a plaster cylinder. “To do one of these kinds of restaurants, it costs five hundred thousand to a million dollars,” says Clark. Smiling, he adds, “The good architects shop around. When they let me do it my way, I go for the less expensive material.”
The effect brings to mind a tony yet ultimately informal Los Angeles bistro —not surprising, since Clark and 612 co-owner Greg Coury toured 35 L.A. restaurants before they designed 612 West. With an elevated open kitchen, the restaurant almost revolves around chef Tatum, whose preeminence at Jeffrey’s restaurant throughout the eighties ensured a certain buzz for the new endeavor. By hiring Tatum, Coury (who also owns Manuel’s, one of Austin’s most upscale Mexican restaurants) made clear his intentions to join the ranks of the city’s best three dining spots—Jeffrey’s, Zoot, and Hudson’s on the Bend. By bringing in Dick Clark, Coury was, in his words, “opening the statement restaurant in Austin.”
It’s a testament to the Nouveau Grub phenomenon that 612 has succeeded overnight in a town that has openly advertised its aversion to all things urban. For the past two decades, Austin’s archetypal upscale dining spot has been Jeffrey’s, which has placed almost all of its emphasis on gracious service and fine food (the current chef, David Garrido, rivals Tatum as the most inventive in Central Texas), and almost none on decor. The two restaurants now have their own camps, with the Jeffrey’s devotees mocking the new restaurant’s chilly aura and 612’s turks complaining about the older establishment’s spartan atmosphere. In this debate, food seldom comes up.
Personally, I’m all for the Nouveau Grub Ethic—as long as the food is as good as it ought to be. Robert Del Grande speaks enthusiastically about the new generation of chefs. “The young guys in my kitchen are different from the ones who used to be cooking just to hold down a job,” he says. Still, no youthful master chef has stepped out from beneath the fine lights of the new bistros to join the ranks of the state’s elite. They have stepped out, of course, to advertise their names. But PR savvy, a Culinary Institute of America certificate, and a minor in accounting do not a chef make. Stephan Pyles laments the Snopes-like rise of the ambitious but soulless chef, and it is fair to say that a number of the Nouveau Grub restaurants are thusly afflicted. For some of these establishments, the signature dish is a colorful disaster—what Star Canyon manager Michael Cox terms “white willow-grilled Waco wahoo-wahoo with winter wheat waffles in a wild walnut sauce.”
The best restaurants will use artifice as a kind of thematic reinforcement. The rest will use it as a misdirection. Dick Clark has done a remarkable job with the brick-and-metal interior of Bitter End, but the fare has not thus far lived up to the trappings. Esquire magazine proclaimed Houston-based Americas to be “the best new restaurant in America,” and though it is possible to have an excellent meal there, multiple dining experiences leave one convinced that Americas earned its honor principally because of the Starship-Enterprise-goes-to-the-Caribbean spectacle that Chicago architect Jordan Mozer has created. And recently eight of us dined at Natura Cafe, an ultra-trendy ultra-healthy Dallas establishment that features the usual Nouveau Grub rudiments, along with a sculptural twist: a massive apsaragus looming over the restaurant’s exterior. A few of us were still talking about the asparagus the next morning, but we didn’t give a thought to what we had eaten.
By and large, however, the Nouveau Grub movement is rolling out impressive cuisine at prices that make it hard to complain. In Dallas Sipango epitomizes the best of the genre: a beautiful brick interior with beaded lanterns and well-spaced furnishings, a smart and energetic wait staff, and a young chef-owner from Los Angeles named Matthew Antonovich whose Italian variations are a refreshing departure from the ancho-cilantro riffraff. When the kitchen is alive, Houston’s Quilted Toque combines healthy and imaginative dishes with some of the most strikingly tasteful decor in the city. Though 612 West has justifiably drawn the lion’s share of Austin’s Nouveau Grub denizens, Stonewall’s has followed in the footsteps of Zoot by very quietly doing everything right in the kitchen. And everyone expects the new Biga offshoot on the San Antonio River Walk to showcase Bruce Auden’s artistry as Star Canyon will likely return Stephan Pyles to the forefront of culinary taste making.
I paid a final visit in the middle of March to what will soon be Star Canyon. Construction was well under way, and as I watched Pyles pace thoughtfully through the tangle of ladders, cables, ducts, and scrap wood, I realized that throughout our many visits—throughout the hours of eavesdropping while the Star Canyon co-owner inspected logo samples, thumbed through wait staff uniform catalogues, conceived tile mural designs, fended off insurance salesmen, and discussed the finer points of kitchen ventilation—we had not talked at all about what would be on Star Canyon’s menu. Nouveau Grub is, finally, about fine dining. But the genius of its economy of scale involves a smoke-and-mirrors elegance, in which high culinary standards may easily disappear by sleight of hand. So I asked Pyles about his new menu, half-wondering if he would then produce a market-tested sheet of items that distinguished themselves, above all, by their grim adherence to the bottom line.
Pyles tapped his temple and said, “It’s all up here.” With that he smiled and returned his gaze to the window, watching the traffic that would be his.
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