(Two years ago, in Liberty, Texas…)
Based on a really old recommendation from Robb Walsh, I finally ate at one of the locations of Baytown Seafood, the mini-chain of Vietnamese-run restaurants now sprawling across the Greater Houston area.
The menu, at least at the Liberty outpost, is insane. You can get any combination of shrimp, fish, oysters and scallops at many different price points. Want one fish, three shrimp, five oysters, and a scallop? $15. Or maybe you want three fish, two oysters, six shrimp, and three scallops. That'll be $17. And on and on -- endless permutations.
You end up just throwing a dart at the menu, more or less.
All meals are served with fries and a "salad." Scare quotes are because it was the most laughable such agglomeration of edible greenery I've seen since maybe 1977. Some crumpled iceberg lettuce, a gossamer dusting of shredded carrot, and a paper-thin sliver of tomato. They bring you your dressing in an industrial sized plastic squeeze bottle, so that's nice.
One the other hand, the seafood is pretty damn good. Oysters and shrimp retain their flavor through the light cornmeal coating and I am pretty sure the fish was not tilapia. And again, they give you your cocktail and tartar sauce in those big ol' squeeze bottles. The iced tea was noticeably above standard -- very strong taste of actual tea.
But man, the atmosphere. Horrid. Laughably bad. I was the only customer. There was no music. Just a loud AC whining from across the room. Dingy white walls, bare of adornment. It's sandwiched between a tattoo parlor and a vape shop. (Across the highway, there's another tattoo parlor -- this one somewhat famous for its "Yahweh-Approved" billing.)
The Vietnamese owner turned on the TV for a second and watched some show about the US Marines and how they go to Thailand and chop a cobra to pieces and then drink its blood. It's one of their rituals. He was so impressed by this he stopped the program and waited for the young Anglo waitress to come out of the kitchen so he could rewind it and show it to her, after he told her what she was going to see. And then he talked about how he wished he'd joined the Marines, but he was probably too old now, and how his friends who had enlisted had a blast in the service. "But if you get in a fight, that's bad," he said. "I'd miss my baby too much," the waitress said. She was a strapping baby-faced strawberry blonde -- she looked like she'd walked out of some Dutch Master's farm scene, and couldn't have been more than 19.
And then the owner turned the TV off and it was just me and my seafood platter. And I got to thinking: this must be what it was like for condemned men eating their last meal. In fact, if I had been in their shoes, I might have ordered this very seafood platter. And I am sure that dining room in The Walls was very much like this restaurant in Liberty, Texas -- nervous-making tube lighting, bare white walls, straining AC, silence.
Oh well. TDCJ ended that practice a few years back, so I guess I'll never know for sure.
I love the comparison to the last meal on death row. Perfectly captures the hopelessness of each scene though the reasons are different.
Okay, the food, the a/c and the Yahweh approved tattoo parlor. Is this the new "fusion?"