Viva Lazy Me

By Joe Yonan in Features, Food on June 24, 2011 at 4:24 pm | 1 Comment

Back in the day—that is, the ’80s, when I was a journalism student—there were plenty of places to eat, even for a poor undergrad thankful for UT’s dirt-cheap tuition but trying to afford 12 packages of ramen noodles for $1 at the HEB.

We’d go to Mad Dog & Beans for hot dogs and shakes, Conans for pizza, and Ruby’s for barbecue. For brunch, there was Las Manitas for migas or the Omelettry for gingerbread pancakes. For enchiladas and chips and queso and margaritas (frozen, no salt please), there was Trudy’s or Chuy’s or any number of other Tex-Mex joints.

And there were plenty of places to drink and just hang out for hours on end: the Hole in the Wall for Shiner Bocks and live bands, Quack’s for espresso and conversation, and the aforementioned Trudy’s/Chuy’s etc. for more margaritas and more conversation. But there was only one place to do all of the above, and that was Les Amis.

It was one of the focal points for Austin’s “slacker” culture, given that you could slack there pretty much all day if you wanted, and in fact it was featured heavily in Richard Linklater’s film of that name.

Of course, the other reason we hung out at Les Amis so much and for so long was that it was dirt-cheap. The food was nothing earth-shattering; I vaguely recall a bountiful bread basket, big if mediocre green salads, some sort of chicken breast on the bone with some sort of French-seeming sauce, perhaps tarragon cream, although I might be making that up—they tried to get bistro-ish here and there.

It was the kind of place where you couldn’t get a waitress’s attention because she was too busy breaking up with her boyfriend on the public phone.

But the dish I got most frequently, the one that powered me through, was something they called the Peasant’s Bowl: black beans, rice, and cheese. Simple and cheap, just a couple of bucks. Large quantity, small investment. It wasn’t French, by any stretch, but it was Austin through and through.

Les Amis happens to be one of the first places I remember having a glass of wine with dinner. When I could get it, that is. You see, the reason patrons could hang out all day there was because the staff wasn’t in any hurry, either. The place earned its nickname, Lazy Me, because of its notoriously lackadaisical service. One Daily Texan columnist wrote at the time that it was the kind of place where you couldn’t get a waitress’s attention because she was too busy breaking up with her boyfriend on the public phone.

One former waitress described her mindset to the filmmakers in the 2005 documentary Viva Les Amis like so: “If I felt like I needed to have a cigarette or a glass of wine before going to talk to someone, then that’s what I would do.”

I only saw the documentary this year, when researching a travel story about Austin for the Washington Post. Frankly, I was a little upset to learn about the action I was apparently missing while tucking into all those peasant’s bowls. As the movie makes clear, those waitresses were so blasé about service because they had other priorities: not just getting drunk or breaking up, but also getting stoned and having sex with the cooks and other staff out on the back porch.

One cook swears to the filmmakers that he never lit up in the kitchen, but just as he says that, the movie flashes up a photo of him with a joint dangling from his lips as he attends to some pan or another on the stove. Other shots in the movie show that Les Amis, particularly at the live music shows that I never seemed to make it to, attracted people who were somehow always drawn to remove one or all their articles of clothing.

Les Amis became a victim of rising rents and closed in 1997, eight years after I left Austin. Like many of us who whiled away hour upon hour at Les Amis drinking wine, eating beans and rice, and waiting for our waitress to get off the damn phone, the closure merged in our memories with our own departure from Austin. But nothing prepared me for the shock I experienced in 1998, when I was visiting friends in Austin, driving through West Campus, and saw what had risen on the spot where Les Amis had been demolished.

It was the coffee chain as rooted in corporate sameness as Les Amis was in quirky independence. The facade was new, sitting on a concrete platform: bright and colorful and scrubbed completely of any vestige of the funky old place that had been there for more than a quarter century.

At this Starbucks, students can surely hang out for hours on end, just as we did at Quack’s or at Les Amis. But a skinny venti caramel latte in 2011 costs at least twice as much as a peasant’s bowl did in 1985, and, to make matters worse, it’s delivered with a smile as carefully scripted as the employee dress code. Worst of all, if a Starbucks barista were to feel like having a glass of wine or cigarette before waiting on me, I would be much less patient than I was back in the day, back when I could slack with the best of them.

Viva Lazy Me.

Joe Yonan, food and travel editor of the Washington Post, is a 1989 journalism graduate. He is the author of Serve Yourself: Nightly Adventures in Cooking for One.

Photo: Slackers at Les Amis, 1975. By Alan Pogue.

Next: Read what it was like to work and eat in the Jester Center cafeteria in the ’80s.

 

Tags: Joe Yonan, Les Amis