The winding ten by ten block triangle that makes up the Cherrywood neighborhood in East Austin has become my pandemic safe-haven.
While the neighborhood is quiet for the most part, it will surprise me from time to time. One neighbor has taken to putting balloon animal masterpieces in his front lawn. Another spent days using chalk to write out an abridged but thorough history of racial inequality in the United States, going back to 1619, on the sidewalk.
One such surprise came in the form of a pink and yellow golf cart. I saw it from a distance, careening through Cherrywood’s canopied streets. As it swerved closer, I could make out Zydeco music blaring from a bluetooth speaker. Closer still, a set of bullhorns with hawk’s feathers affixed to the grill with the words "Free Gumbo" boldly declaring this vehicle's majestic purpose.
Vic and Al’s gumbo-mobile was a surprise that I needed to learn more about.
Nic Patrizi gives away gumbo from his new restaurant Vic and Al’s.
Nic Patrizi is the type of restaurant entrepreneur that Austin’s restaurant scene was built around. The scraggly beard, hair pulled back, fast-talking Texan is someone wholly unpretentious but also willing to let people know that if they want a quick bite to eat, they might be better served heading down the block. He makes damned good food, but he isn’t going to let making a quick buck get in the way of making sure the experience he builds around your meal is as exceptional as the food itself.
Nic Patrizi drives his gumbo-mobile through Cherrywood in East Austin.
My first impression of Nic was while in line for Patrizi’s, an Italian food truck on Manor Road on the east side of Austin. He carried himself in a way that gave the impression that “this guy owns the place”—it turns out that he did. Patrizi’s is a food truck that has a thirty-minute line every single night, pretty much from the moment it opens. Yet Nic and his team have managed to turn the agonizing drudgery of waiting into a curated experience. They’ll hold your spot in line as you get a drink, offer house-made snacks, and go through the entire menu to help strategize your order so that the moment you hit the register, you’ve already built the perfect meal.
Having learned from his experiences at Patrizi’s, Nic was slated to open Vic and Al’s, a brick-and-mortar across the street from the food truck, serving Cajun cuisine and craft cocktails. He was ready to implement the same type of forward-thinking experience building into a streamlined dining experience.
As COVID-19 forced restaurants to temporarily shut their doors, pivot to take out, and generally reevaluate the state of their businesses, Nic was days away from opening Vic and Al’s. Needless to say, things didn’t go quite as planned.
As impending layoffs threatened service industry workers, some owners put their people before profit and figured out creative ways to keep their businesses afloat while taking care of their employees. Other owners, including some large restaurant groups with national holdings, laid off entire workforces with little more than a bag of produce that was already on its way out. The Austin service industry came grinding to a halt, wiping out an entire community’s source of income. At the same time, cooks, bartenders, servers, and bussers accustomed to nights filled with lively banter between coworkers, drinks after work, and digging themselves out of the weeds were all of a sudden reckoning with a much slower pace and a very limited ability to connect with the communities they were a part of.
Seeing a need within the local service industry, Nic and his team paused their plans to open a new restaurant, and instead opened a soup kitchen, free for displaced service industry workers and whoever else needed something to eat. Nic quickly realized that the soup kitchen within Vic and Al’s became as much about providing for people’s mental health as it was a space dedicated to nurturing people’s physical health.
“Manor Road was already here.”
When asked about how he sees himself in the broader East Austin community and especially on Manor Road where he now runs two restaurants, Nic pointed to the past. “Manor Road was already here.”—meaning the community was already here. As opposed to seeing himself as a part of some new, he sees himself as entering an already established community, one that he respects deeply.
He pointed to the diversity that exists along Manor, which extends from the more affluent Cherrywood neighborhood through the more working-class neighborhoods that exist as Manor Road travels East across Airport Boulevard. And also to the diversity that exists within Austin’s service industry community more broadly.
His food truck Patrizi’s exists within a space called The VORTEX. It’s an outdoor space built around an artist-owned, alternative theatre space. Their 2018-2019 season showcased performances that ranged from American Blood Song: A Puppet Operetta of The Donner Party to black girl love, “an adaptation of [Anondra 'Kat'] Williams' short stories and poetry that looks at the everyday lives of black queer women and non-binary people.”
Learning from the inclusivity that Nic saw in The VORTEX, the soup kitchen at Vic and Al’s helped uplift a hurting service industry and the surrounding community during the initial fallout from the pandemic.
As unemployment payments started coming through, bringing some short-term financial security to service industry workers, it was time for Nic to refocus on Vic and Al’s, the soup kitchen, back to Vic and Al’s, the Cajun restaurant.
Nic’s passion and deep knowledge of Cajun food and culture is apparent. Having grown up in Beaumont, Texas, near the Louisiana border, his roots are in Cajun country. For him, Cajun cuisine is a style of cooking that is closely connected to the land and emphasizes using everything. “It’s storied, it’s seasonal, it’s fresh...It’s about process and history.”
“The end result is something beautiful, swampy, funky, and fun.”
He finds that a lot of people have a simplistic view of Cajun food—crawfish boils and shrimp po-boys. And while he finds beauty in people fighting over the best way to make barbecue shrimp for example, he also finds simplified characterizations to be “a slap in the face of the diaspora of Cajun cuisine.” A diaspora that draws from West African, French, and Italian cooking styles, to name a few. At the same time, a lot of people categorize what he’s doing as “a modern twist on Cajun”—a refrain he finds equally ridiculous.
Nic spent five minutes explaining how he makes Vic and Al’s demi-glace to describe why calling what they’re doing “a modern twist” doesn’t make sense.
While a “proper” demi-glace is made with veal bones and Bordeaux, Nic uses trimmings and the bones from his house-cured tasso ham combined with whatever combination of wine and spirits feels right, is on hand, and tastes good to him that day. The vegetables that make up the mirepoix he adds to the sauce are often scraps from other recipes and their combination never resembles a traditional mirepoix. Finally, he lets the sauce develop for five days instead of the more standard two.
“The end result is something beautiful, swampy, funky, and fun.” To Nic, that fluid and divergent process of using what’s on hand to build off classic techniques and traditional Cajun recipes is as Cajun as it gets.
The house made bitters at Vic and Al’s.
Terra Stahlbaum, Vic and Al’s Bar Manager.
Vic and Al’s cocktail menu was built around the same principles. As other restaurants chose to focus on making cocktail kits, Terra Stahlbaum, Vic and Al’s talented bar manager came up with a to-go cocktail program utilizing single-serve, heat-sealed bags.
As Terra was forced to reimagine her cocktail menu, she asked herself “What do I think people would want in this time?” She figured people wanted something fun, approachable, exciting, but also nothing intimidating. Most importantly, “I want you to get the taste of sitting at my bar from the comfort of your home.”
Ashlynn Patrizi prepares one of Vic and Al’s heat-sealed to-go cocktails.
She felt that even with cocktail kits, there’s some amount of work that needs to be done. With Vic and Al’s to-go cocktail program, it’s as easy as pouring the premade cocktail over ice.
While Terra has certainly been up for the dynamism required to navigate COVID-19 as a bar manager, “It’s hard not to see someone’s reaction to the cocktail I made.”
“We have regulars, but you don’t get an hour and a half with them a week. You get two minutes.”
Terra describes the distance that permeates every aspect of her job. “Distance from that initial reaction to that cocktail. Distance between orders. Distance between customers, but also distance between me and the final cocktail.”
As people take their drinks home, they present them in creative ways and post them to social media. Terra is able to see the final forms her cocktails take as different people add their own touches with different glassware and flare.
As members of the service industry return to work, the daily grind of working at a restaurant has created a disarming new reality for a community accustomed to a faster pace and less space. The reality that exists now is one in which distance exists where close proximity was the norm.
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To be greeted by a masked go-kart driver shelling out free gumbo as I walked through my neighborhood during a global pandemic was a goddamn miracle. But the more I learned about what Nic, Terra, and the team at Vic and Al’s, the more I’ve been drawn to their story.
If you’re lucky enough to be in Cherrywood in Austin, Texas as the sun starts to go down, listen not for the familiar plunking of an ice cream truck, but for the faint heartbeat of Zydeco hopefully getting louder as a wondrous, long-horned golf cart gets closer and closer.
If you don’t live in Cherrywood, I hope you can take solace in the fact that this gumbo go-kart simply exists. As we raise our glasses to computer screens for virtual happy hours instead of exchanging banter with our bartenders, it’s beautiful to watch people’s creativity come through in these amazing, inventive ways as they foster meaningful connections with their communities.
When things do begin to open back up and you come to Austin to escape the East Coast winter, for your best friend’s bachelorette, or to experience our decadent food culture first hand, make sure to stop by Vic and Al’s. There will probably be a line, but it’ll be worth the wait.