Just Another Pretty Spot...

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

AUSTIN, Texas - The world knows of Sixth Street here like it knows of Beale Street in Memphis as a main drag for the blues and of Canyon Road as the path to the best art galleries in Santa Fe, New Mexico. What you see in Austin is what you get, and, often, that is insanity, right there, right outside the booths in bars and restaurants up and down the city's most famous street.

Relatively new to the area's drinking and partying scene is a Tex-Mex eatery whose gaudy, blue-yellow sign, faces Sixth Street, there next door to Emo's nightclub. El Sol y La Luna stands proudly not more than two blocks west of I-35, and some distance from its previous location on South Congress.

The attraction is the food, of course, but it also sports a nice bar and a decent stage where nightly shows allow patrons to catch up with unique Spanish music or, during the South By Southwest annual music extravaganza, some hard-ass rock'n'roll. A peek at the eatery's excitable ceiling is worth the visit. Art flows like runaway tap water in Austin, is what they say - always the avant garde and always the excitement of something done just a little differently. Yep, keep Austin weird.

We settled in for a late-morning breakfast after picking a booth alongside a row of picture windows that faced Sixth Street. It was early in the day; people cut across the street at strange angles, some dressed as if part of some visiting circus act, glitter and bright fashion, boots thrown in just because it's Texas. Across town, at scenic Zilker Park, the masses were beginning to gather for Day Two of the Austin City Limits Music Festival. Huevos a la Mejicana for me, I said to the petite Hispanic waitress after Margaret opted for the chicken enchiladas.

"Chips, mas chips," I threw out some minutes later, wishing to sound All-Valley in the busy restaurant. Like my mother used to say to me when I was a boy, this waitress fired back with her own local line, "If you eat too many of those you're going to ruin your appetite." I nodded and she departed, returning minutes later with a second basket of the damned things. I'm something of a salsa expert, but only the red. Green salsa is a joke, better suited for cows and horses; those ranch superstars, or maybe even some lost, anachronistic pachuco in town for supplies. Whatever.

Anyway, its owners put it this way: "Now in its 16th year of business in Austin, El Sol y La Luna Restaurant is a local, Latina and lesbian-owned establishment." Okay. It was bound to happen. Americans are wearing their mores out in the open these days, so why shouldn't businesses?

The owner is a woman named Nilda de la Llata, who moved to Austin the mid-1980s and began her career as a restauranteur by working as a waitress.

Her approach is not unlike that of other Tex-Mex joints: she greets her customers as if greeting family, offers semi-decent grub and provides evening music ranging from the staple Mariachi stuff to soulful balladeers to Mana-style Spanish rock'n'roll. It's on the city's main party drag, so the colorful restaurant keeps party hours, closing at 2 Ayem, like the neighboring bars.

As for the food on this sun-splashed Saturday, well, it could have been a bit better. But it's salsa-drowned eggs and rice and beans and warm tortillas, so...

The Lesbian angle eludes me, perhaps because I have no way of judging that aspect of the restaurant. I mean, does it matter that the owner is Gay? The only other weird eatery in that league I recall is another Tex-Mex joint, this one in Dallas: Monica's Aca y Alla.

That owner, however, was a husky Hispanic man who liked to dress in women's clothing...

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