Welcome to The Strip Club, highlighting Austin’s destination strip malls. Where else can you buy a hanging plant pot in the likeness of Willie Nelson then clear your lungs in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber? Light a Phoebe Bridgers votive candle while digesting a dinosaur rib? Order Swamp Curry, a dirty martini, and mini corn dogs in the same restaurant? All aboard for Lakehills Plaza!
When I was young, they opened a Target in our town, and my mother called it “tar-zhay” – and that’s still the demographic: Walmart for people who can pronounce a handful of words in French. When it comes to any big box, I can leave it, but I’ve always been fascinated by the desperate, forlorn vibes of their snack bar.
Has anyone ever actually eaten there? Do they allow people to buy beer in-store and drink it in the snack bar area with their hot dog purchase? Can I bring my own Fritos? I need answers, but there aren’t any, because the Target at South Austin’s Lakehills Plaza doesn’t have a snack bar – it has a Starbucks. So I make lemonade from lemons, order a venti latte with three shots of espresso, and exit before I buy a bunch of stuff I didn’t know I needed.
Jacked to the gills, I storm into iCRYO, a come-as-you-are, pay-as-you-go, à la carte wellness center offering relief from all manner of ailments, including anxiety, arthritis, fibromyalgia, rashes, acne, and the personally resonant “500 Calorie Burn” – all treated by a menagerie of hocus pocus including infrared sauna, compression therapy, and whole-body cryotherapy.
Mostly, it seems like a place where lazy people deny reality in lieu of eating right and exercising, so I decide to honor them by putting 500 calories into my body at one of my favorite places in town – Ocean Blue Oyster Bar – formerly the Laotian-owned Deckhand Oyster Bar & Seafood, now run by “five Vietnamese dudes” who changed the name, but kept it the same. It’s a wondrous, thunderous mix of Thai restaurant, sports bar, and Long John Silver’s – and the menu goes long and hard, with everything from po’boys to Swamp Curry.
Speaking of long and hard, there’s a nature show on one of the TVs behind me showing two sharks copulating, which prompts my 9-year-old to say, “Daddy, why are those sharks connected like that?” Confused, I turn and catch the tail end of a cross-section animation of a gentleman shark ejaculating inside a lady shark without protection. It’s a lot for everyone to process, so I change the subject to “a dirty martini and a dozen raw oysters,” which are revelatory when paired with the house-made nam jim sauce brought to every table.
The superstar of the menu remains the Salt & Pepper Special: your choice of protein (chicken wings, frog legs, shrimp, calamari, or – the only real choice – soft-shell crab) tempura battered, and served with onion, garlic, cilantro, and jalapeño over cabbage. Coupled with the aforementioned nam jim and a cold beer, it’s paradise.
Down-menu, after the fried seafood section – and a variety of oddly named dishes like Drunken Sailor, Longhorn Stuffed Catfish, and Rising Phoenix – what sticks out are Siamese staples like tom yum, tom kha, red curry, green curry, and their pad see ew, which is notable because it’s prepared like the ones in Bangkok – slightly wok-burnt.
Mussels vin blanc, which you expect to be the traditional French version with white wine, garlic, and parsley, is instead prepared with a base of ginger, lemongrass, tomato, red onion, bamboo, mushrooms, and cilantro. The garlic bread sidecar makes no culinary sense until you dip it into the broth, and a kaleidoscope of flavors emerge that make you wonder why there’s not more butter in Asian cuisine since globalization.
Ocean Blue Oyster Bar is a wondrous, thunderous mix of Thai restaurant, sports bar, and Long John Silver’s – and the menu goes long and hard, with everything from po’boys to Swamp Curry.
In the Isaan region of northeastern Thailand, a common dish is a plate of fresh, pungent papaya salad plated with a piece of fried fish, some chalky vegetables (cabbage, cucumber, green beans), and a basket of sticky rice. Though it’s not on the menu here, it’s easily re-created by ordering their totally authentic, punishingly spicy som tam (which is actually som tam poo, a more pungent version featuring salted field crab), a catfish basket, and a side of sticky rice. For me, it’s what makes this restaurant make sense. I feel like I’m traveling. Khop khun khap.
Expansive emporium Austin Gift Company is a year-round alternative to Blue Genie Art Bazaar, openly taunting shoppers with “Whatever You Don’t Need” – finally, a wooden Millennium Falcon serving tray – from mostly local purveyors who rent booths. It’s a lot to unpack, but what really sticks out is the astonishing number of products blasting slightly offensive catchphrases: a greeting card that puns “Tit’s Your Birthday,” a curio box that posits “If I Was a Bird, I Know Who I’d Shit On,” and a cranky magnet exclaiming “I’m Not a Cactus Expert, But I Know a Prick When I See One!” Who buys this stuff?
Muse Fusion + Sushi loudly echoes Ocean Blue’s Cajun fusion vibes with their Crawdaddy Roll, a dish that unfortunately hides tasty mudbugs under an unreasonably high dose of dried crab boil. Their other roll names are cringe-inducing – OMG, Sexy Tuna, and Krispy Kreme – and some mélange of tempura, cream cheese, jalapeño, spicy mayo, and “crunchy,” an unfortunate combo that reminds of Matthew McConaughey’s recently viral tuna salad: not alright, not alright, not alright. This is sushi for people who don’t appreciate raw fish.
On the upside, their ceviche – a mix of yellowtail, tuna, salmon, and squid with chiles, cucumber, red onion, leafy greens, cherry tomatoes, cilantro, and sesame seeds – is copious, affordable, and well-prepared fusion.
Needing to work off 500 calories yet again, I’m pondering new exercise regimens while browsing the crowded aisles at Play It Again Sports, a small chain peddling used sporting goods in Austin since the 1990s. They’ve got an impressive assortment of secondhand-but-first-rate equipment, particularly Frisbee-golf discs, baseball gloves, and tennis racquets, all at a generous discount when compared to Academy. Recommended.
It’s no secret the best Vietnamese restaurants are far north, but when south, don’t sleep on Mama Châu’s Dong Nai, which has not only the standard bánh mì, bun, and bao, but some less-common dishes like ca kho to (fish in clay pot), bo kho (beef stew), and roasted duck fried rice. Best in Show is the Signature Beef Rib, a dinosaur bone that comes tender and tendon-y, plopped in a bowl of pho, whose broth surprises in its layered delicacy.
Retrieving my vehicle from the Target parking lot at dusk, I gaze westward over the serpentine 290/71/360 overpass, and it dawns on me why they named it Sunset Valley (pop. 683), and why in 1954, they kept that landlocked beauty for themselves.
Lakehills Plaza
4211 S. Lamar Blvd.
This article appears in January 17 • 2025.