Welcome back to The Strip Club, highlighting Austin’s destination strip malls. Where else can you dream of sushi on a “Shatterday” night? Contemplate the lost grandeur of the ancients while drenched in honey-baked ham sweats? Drown your sorrows in an EDM cover of “Take On Me”? A-ha! Pour one out for Phil Collins, because we’re in the land of confusion: Colonnade!
Like suburban subdivisions, strip mall names are a longstanding joke, and Colonnade lands the punchline, not only gaslighting classical architecture, but lowering the bar for how many objectively bad design decisions can exist in a single retail construction project.
It’s a bewildering hodgepodge of styles that don’t warrant description, but I can tell you the only thing here remotely resembling the Parthenon or St. Peter’s Square are the supports holding up Highway 183 across the boulevard. For sure, there are more columns in this newspaper.
But if writing about music is like dancing about architecture, can writing about architecture be like dancing about food?
Suddenly dazed – and confusing even myself – I take shelter at Casa Chapala, enticed by the pithy, pre-programmed messages broadcasting from the digital marquee mounted on their brick façade:
Margaritas. Because adulting is hard.
How do I stop eating chips and salsa? Do they run out, do I die? Or what?
Soup of the Day: Margarita w/ H2O croutons.
Eat here. Or we both starve!!
Not exactly El Arroyo sign-level humor, but this isn’t a comedy club, it’s a 21st century Chi-Chi’s offering a regular smorgasbord I wish they’d call “Jimmy’s buffet,” because this rockin’ yacht has already set sail for Margaritaville.
An array of flappy laminated menus – rivaled in number only by our normcore friends at Red Lobster – are plopped on the table, and my server Diego is straight to the point: “Drinks?”
Primed by the hot parking lot, and because adulting is hard, I dive into a Mexican martini. The house tequila is El Toro, so I upgrade to Don Julio and hope for the best, but it’s not – my special sauce is drowned in that god-awful generic margarita mix we all know and hate: the one that tastes like powdered lime and formaldehyde. Forget fake weed – Dan Patrick should focus on making this shit illegal.
In lockstep, a waitress sidles up to the table with a tray of bowls and starts mixing la salsa en vivo. She asks how spicy, then adds salt, pepper, and a spoonful of dried chile arbol. Diego’s back in a flash: “You ready?” I’m still trying to get all my menus facing north, but as I’m fumbling, I sense the general vibe is interior Mexican with a life raft of mariscos and Tex-Mex.
Hastily, I settle on the Pipian Verde (grilled chicken topped in green mole) with rice and “vegetables,” which he says are “pumpkin.” But when the plate arrives, it’s zucchini. I’m confused at first, but then realize I’m the one who’s out of his gourd, because there’s only one word in Spanish for all varieties of squash – calabaza – and he’s not disambiguating.
The food isn’t great, the prices aren’t cheap, and I wonder how this party barge has stayed afloat since 1987 given all the quality local competition in the interior Mexican space. And I know … (da-da-da-da-da) … it’s my own damn fault.
There are much better options in the same category, at a similar price point, not that far away.
Next door at Acceptance Insurance, I wonder if that means you accept you’re going to get into an accident, or that you accept you must legally have insurance? Either way, it’s insurance you’re gonna need after hitting the Sacred Leaf Dispensary next door, which has Munchie Monday, Hump Day Hemp Day, Freaky Frydaze, and Shatterday – though you’re probably better off waiting out your faux-pot high at Arcade UFO, a hole-in-the-wall featuring Austin’s only curated assortment of Japanese and Korean video games focused on two things that definitely don’t jive: fighting and music.
Clinging to the Far East vibe, I plop into a booth at Mikado Ryotei (est. 2002), which self-identifies as “Northern Japanese” cuisine, but my first clue this is “North Austin Japanese” is the B-league summer football game on the TV – accompanied by a cringy EDM covers playlist of Eighties hits like “Sailing” by (Austin’s own) Christopher Cross, “Time of the Season” by the Zombies, and an addled version of “Cocaine” by Eric Clapton that I have to admit, finds me wanting to dance about food. She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie …
But there’s no way I’m ordering sashimi in a restaurant with televised sports, so I play it safe and order the Caterpillar and Longhorn rolls, both of which have so many ingredients listed, I can’t imagine what they might taste like – but there’s beef on the latter, which is so wrong, I just have to see it.
The rolls come, and this isn’t so much Jiro dreaming of sushi, but his waking nightmare. It has avocado, crunchy bits, and sauce all over it. I’ve always called this stuff “grocery store sushi,” but do we have a name for it? Sauce-shi? Con-fusion cuisine?
At any rate, it’s so far from the baseline of quality fish and rice, it could make a tiger cry. Sure, I could have taken my chances on $200 worth of nigiri, but any sensible person who wants to drop two bills goes to Uchi/ko. Turnover on downs.
Still hungry, I slide down to Zaika Indian Cuisine, because my phone says they have Indian burritos for $10, and I just can’t get enough con-fusion cuisine. But – que lástima – they’re not on the menu, and I’m not in the mood to find out why not, so I order lamb kebabs, aloo gobi, naan, and a mango lassi.
The waitress says this joint used to be called Madras Pavilion, and I believe her, because it looks like it’s been here since the dawn of the Roman Empire, and has the eerie feel of a restaurant where someone lives in the back.
As I’m transfixed watching a contortionist on India’s Got Talent turn his head 180° while simultaneously walking backward on his hands, the grub arrives. It’s all correct, but nothing, um, head-turning? Seems like they do most of their business Jimmy-buffet style during the lunch rush, even offering a puzzling-to-me oil-free vegan spread on Sundays.
That said, I can’t imagine returning here unless my car insurance lapses while I’m super stoned in the parking lot and I’ve got an abiding case of curry lust. Like the other restaurants in this strip mall, there are much better options in the same category, at a similar price point, not that far away.
Tired of trying to make it all make sense, I decide to keep things simple at the Honey Baked Ham Company, which seems to be riding out the aporkalypse by doling out family meals featuring their trademark spiral-cut ham. Not one to go whole hog, I order the original ham sandwich, which comes thick-cut on a hamburger bun with sweet honey glaze on the bottom half. I’m confused, though, when I realize it’s a $10 ham sandwich I could make at home for two.
Colonnade
9029 Research Blvd.
This article appears in September 12 • 2025.