A little less than a month ago, Mark Miller, one of America’s most famous
chefs, opened the Coyote Cafe at 612 West Sixth Street in downtown
Austin,
thereby becoming the first “celebrity chef” to venture into the Austin
market.
Miller is best known for bringing chile peppers into the mainstream of
American
cooking. His Great Chile Posters and Great Salsa Book are
bestsellers. Miller is generally credited with founding the New
Southwestern
Cuisine at his innovative restaurants, Fourth Street Bar & Grill
and Santa
Fe Cafe in Berkeley in the early 1980s. He moved from Berkeley to Santa
Fe, New
Mexico, to open the original Coyote Cafe, which has set standards for
Southwestern cooking across the country ever since. He is the owner and
executive chef of Coyote Cafes in Santa Fe, Las Vegas, and Austin, and
of the
Red Sage Restaurant in Washington, D.C.
I interviewed Miller recently over a plate of bad fajitas
on
Austin’s Eastside. Here’s what he had to say:
Austin Chronicle: You’re the first celebrity chef to
venture
into this market. Why Austin?
Mark Miller: Austin is the state capital of the second largest
state in
the United States. It’s a young town; it’s growing and vital. The
high-tech
industry is evolving here. There’re a lot of highly educated people
with good
income coming in. You don’t want to buy a stock when it’s peaking; you
want to
buy it on the way up.
AC: So you’re buying Austin on the way up?
MM: I think so. Besides, I’ve been coming to Austin for 15 years
and
there’s always been a lot of food excitement here. I think it’s always
been a
food city; whether it’s the Austin Hot Sauce Contest or the Hill
Country Food
and Wine Festival, people here have always been interested in food.
AC:So how come none of the big Texas chefs, like
Stephan
Pyles or Robert Del Grande, have come into this market?
MM: I don’t know. I asked Stephan and Robert if they were
interested in
Austin and they said, “No, Austin is too cheap.” There is so much good
inexpensive food that’s available here, they thought they couldn’t
compete.
But I thought, someone’s going to move in here. And there are other
people who
are looking at Austin: Jimmy Schmidt’s [the highly acclaimed chef at
the
Rattlesnake Club in Denver] looked at it; Bobby Flay [the executive
chef and
owner of the Mesa Grill in New York] looked at it. And now that we’re
here,
you’ll see the market heat up a little bit.
AC:That’s good for us.
MM: People have asked me to do Coyote Cafes in New York and
L.A., but I
didn’t want to do that. I want my restaurants to have a cultural
connection to
the community. That’s why we came to Austin.
I love the organic produce that’s being grown here. I’m thinking to
myself,
“God, it’s so much easier to come in here than it was to come into
Santa Fe.” I
had nothing in Santa Fe. There were no good restaurants, no suppliers,
no
farmer’s market, no organic farming. I was in a town of 50,000 people
where
49,000 couldn’t afford to come into my restaurant.
AC:You really set off a flap in Santa Fe when you
first
arrived, didn’t you? Didn’t you tell somebody there that you weren’t
interested
in the food their grandmother cooked, you were more interested in what
the
Indians were cooking in the Fifth Century?
MM: [laughing] When I first moved there, I went to see the great
restaurants of Santa Fe and I’d see a chef take a number 10 can of El
Paso red
chile sauce and use it as a base for his sauces. I thought, “Jesus
Christ,
there is no New Mexican food here.” I mean it’s all hype. All these
people who
were Hispanic and were so proud of this food and you go and ask them
which
chiles they grind up to make this dish and they’d say, “We just open
this can
of chile sauce and mix it with this canned tomato sauce and pour it
over the
top.” I had to go looking for the true Chimayo chile and hire farmers
to grow
it for me. And then people came up to me and said, “You can’t call this
traditional New Mexican food.” I said, “What you think is traditional
is what
your mother and your grandmother cooked.” I said, “I’m more interested
in what
people were cooking 2,000 years ago, the people who actually lived
here,
centuries before the Anglos came.”
AC:So what’s the reaction to Coyote Cafe in Austin so
far?
Have you started any flaps yet?
MM: Yeah, with the cowhide chairs. What I saw last night,
it was
the first time I looked at the dining room, is that we’re getting this
huge mix
of people, people in shorts, well dressed people, Mexican folks; it’s
very
difficult to get a read on this community. It’s such a diversified
community.
It’s much more heterogeneous.
We are adjusting. We kind of went a little too elegant, I think. The
food
needs to be heartier. We need to do something more like what Rick
Bayless is
doing with Frontera Grill. People are not so nouvelle oriented in
Austin; they
have big appetites here. They also don’t order Texas wines and they
hate our
cowhide chairs.
AC:Why do they hate the cowhide chairs?
MM: It was a funny thing. Three or four women, animal activists,
refused
to sit in the cowhide chairs. You know, we didn’t use plastic on
purpose. The
banquettes are real leather. It’s kind of a trademark. But these women
made a
big deal of refusing to sit in the chairs. I mean, I’m sorry lady, but
we wear
leather shoes, too. What are you supposed to do with the skins after
you kill
the cow, are you supposed to throw them away?
But most people seem to like the decor overall. It’s better than 612
anyway –
I mean, that was one of the ugliest restaurants I’ve ever been in. It
was
really hard, it wasn’t soothing or comfortable. It wasn’t welcoming. I
was
surprised because Austin people don’t seem to want to dress up to go
out and
612 was so modern. Dick Clark [the architect of 612] has been
bad-mouthing us
about what we did to his great masterpiece.
AC:Well, he did win some architectural awards for
it….
MM: Yeah, but the sight lines, looking straight into the
kitchen, and
the noise levels – he designed it from a purely visual sense of
architecture. I
have to design things based on the comfort of the guests. What do they
want to
hear and see?
AC:When I lived in the Bay Area, I used to hang out
at your
first restaurant….
MM: Fourth Street?
AC: Yeah. It was 1981 in Berkeley and it was
the first
time I ever saw innovative food done with Mexican ingredients, the food
that
would later come to be called Southwestern Cuisine. Your Yucatecan
sausage…
MM: That was great sausage!
AC:…and your use of cilantro, it was all new to
me.
MM: You know, Fourth Street is probably a better model for the
kinds of
things we ought to be doing in Austin now. Even though it’s a
restaurant I
started 15 years ago, the food was heartier and the menu was more
experimental
than what we do in Santa Fe or what we do in Vegas, which are different
markets….
AC: Which are tourist markets.
MM: That’s right. We don’t know what we’re doing here yet. The
fact is,
I will adjust the food and the decor and the drinks. You know, people
here like
their drinks sweeter and they don’t like the food as hot. Fifty people
the
first night complained about the yellow chile pasta, 50!
AC: That’s funny; here in Austin, we think of
ourselves as
liking our food really hot.
MM: I know. But the food is hotter in Santa Fe and Vegas. Our
chefs
thought, wow, this is Austin, let’s really give it to them! But people
here
didn’t like it. They like a long, slow burn, not a real up-front heat.
We’re
going to have to work harder here than I thought. And we’re going to
have to be
more flexible, more like the old days at Fourth Street.
AC:Why is that?
MM: Cities like Houston or Dallas are part of the old food
culture. You
have to adapt Southwestern food to be as elegant as French food in
those places
because that is the dominant food culture. In Austin that’s not true.
Austin is
part of the new food culture. There was never a dominant high-end food
culture
here. It was always a grassroots food culture. That’s why Fourth Street
would
have been a great restaurant here. It was more informal; you never knew
what
was going to happen. One night I covered the bar at Fourth Street with
tapas, this is before anybody ever heard of them. We did a
Chinese New
Year’s dinner there that changed people’s minds about Chinese food. The
menu
was never the same two nights in a row.
AC:So what are you going to do on this visit? Are you
cooking
anything?
MM: People always want to know when I’m cooking. No, that’s not
what I
do these days. My job is to go to the restaurant and look at the faces,
look at
the way people dress and how they interact, and to think about how the
restaurant is going to fit into this community. Management likes to
keep things
the same. I have to push for change and they have to push for
consistency. It’s
a good balance.
For instance, we tried to avoid enchiladas here because we didn’t
want to
compete with all the Tex-Mex restaurants, but everybody here wants
enchiladas.
So if that’s what people want, then I think we should do some really
wonderful
enchiladas with some flavored tortillas and different kinds of fillings
and
interesting sauces. Let’s work on the form of the enchilada and show
people we
are a great restaurant because we can be really creative within that
form. To
me, that’s a challenge, but it’s kind of a neat challenge.
It’s like a dating process. We have to form and reform. I don’t know
what we
want to end up doing here. The menu at Coyote Cafe in Austin may be 100
percent
different six months from now. I know we have a good name. But I don’t
want to
come in here and say this is what we do and you can like it or not.
That’s a
bad attitude. n
This article appears in July 14 • 1995 and July 14 • 1995 (Cover).