Austin Texas isn’t weird, it’s COOL

Austin Texas is weird, always has been and they like it like that. The weirdest thing I found about Austin last week is how damn big it has gotten in the four years we have been in Fargo. It is staggering - the high rises, the hotels and traffic that are choking out the hill country skyline almost make it unrecognizable, until you get downtown. Sitting in an outside café with the brunette and some local friends, weird strolled by in the form of a sixty plus year old man sporting a tiny G-string, boots and some flashy body paint, pausing to pose and throw a big smile to the diners.

Most people outside of Austin don’t know what Austin Weird is all about. It is all about keeping small independent businesses independent and stopping big corporations taking control. Austin is home to several Fortune 500 companies but they keep a low profile and small footprint. Austin is also the live music capital of the world with more music venues per capita than any other major city. What other city has twenty-three music venues in its airport?

This town is all about music, food and film. It is host to South by Southwest which draws in half a million people every year to listen to music, see great Indie films and the latest in technology. With a world-class film festival, on par with Toronto or Sundance, this town has a pulse that never stops -- and along with all that a food scene as diverse and eclectic as any major city, and rocking right along with the likes of hometown blues player phenom Gary Clarke Jr, aka Sonny Boy Slim.

I first started going to Austin about thirty years ago when I was invited to the Texas Hill Country Wine & Food Festival. Austin was a cool little town back then and in some ways hasn’t changed that much. The festival still takes place every year but is now a Food & Wine magazine event. It was cool back then as we all could fit into the ballroom at the Four Season Hotel, half a dozen chefs cooked a course each for the big dinner. Wine guru Karen McNeil brought a young Bobby Flay one year for a tour of Texas before he opened his first restaurant back in New York. Ed and Susan Auler of Fall Creek Vineyards were organizers and hosted some of us at the vineyard, where we ate well and drank our weight in wine. Great times and it hasn’t changed. Austin isn’t weird - it is just plain cool.

The food scene in Austin back then was top-heavy with barbecue, Mexican and homespun Texas ranch hand cooking like Chicken Fried Steak, a staple even today. Modern Southwest food was the new wave of culinary creativity launched by Dallas chefs Dean Fearing and Stephen Pyles along with Mark Miller in Santa Fe and John Sedlar in LA. But it was the rise of food trucks in the past six years that sparked a blaze of every kind of food imaginable and it is still going strong today. Some of those trucks are now brick and mortar restaurants like the Odd Duck, a culinary hipster haven, while others have become permanent fixtures, tucked into residential areas and lining the vibrant, retro, South Congress scene.

Moving to Fargo almost five years ago I told my friends back home that Fargo was in some ways a smaller version of Austin. Lots of university students, a lively music scene, some hip restaurants and an abundance of art. Fargo has changed a lot in those years with extensive growth in the west and south. But it is the downtown core that is trying to be revitalized and resuscitated. New condos are bringing back a downtown core population and some snappy shops have put a fresh face on Broadway. But it feels like the energy has gone out of the resurgence. Music venues aren’t on the rise, dining opportunities are overpowered by hard-drinking bars. Most restaurants downtown cater to the 21-and-over crowd with only a few that don’t, and they are not fine dining. It’s more of a college craft beer, cocktail bar scene than a rising food and music mecca.

It will be interesting to see how Fargo evolves. Will downtown become an alcohol-fueled reflection of Sixth Street in Austin or Bourbon Street in New Orleans while the food scene manifests itself elsewhere? Fargo doesn’t need to try to be weird - it needs to focus on being cool. Finding a peaceful balance between a cool club scene and a vibrant restaurant presence would be ideal.

Unfortunately, a young friend of mine who works downtown in the evening told me she would rather walk alone at night in Manhattan than Fargo. That is pretty telling of how things might be slipping backwards. Having worked and lived in towns that rely on tourist income they need to make their core attractive to a wide spectrum of people. There is a lot of money being spent in restaurants on the west side of town because of the easy access and safety.

I have spent many a night on Bourbon Street and Sixth Street. They are club destinations and the booze flows freely, but I have never seen a fight. People go there to have a good time and everyone walks freely. Downtown Fargo needs to protect its image, especially as the night closes in and the booze has been flowing. With more diversity it will attract a bigger cross-section of the economic spectrum and be people-friendly to everyone. It is becoming a bit one-dimensional. It is a tale of two cities, one by day and the other by night.

Let’s keep Fargo cool not weird.