The family that eats out together...

Evidently there is some concern about Mom and I spending our retirement in the kitchen. Rest assured, we still eat out a lot. And we like, for the most part, to go to familiar places – tried and true, where we seldom have to look at the menu (or the menu is a sign on the wall). However, in our old age we sometimes get a little wild and crazy and go off in search of some place new to eat. There is no end to the choices for lunch or dinner – just drive out I-35 and survey the crop of national chain restaurants that hug the access roads; Bennigans, Golden Wok, Pei Wei, Saltgrass Steakhouse, Cheddar’s, Johnny Carrino’s, Carraba’s Italian Grill, Joe’s Crab Shack, etc. etc.

And, this being a real foodie town, I could name 50 locally-owned restaurants that get multiple stars in the travel guides, never mind the 150 really funky places that make Austin what it is – places like Dirty’s Hamburgers and Hut’s and Frisco Shops, and of course, Chuy’s.

But we were just looking for some place besides McDonalds or IHOP to have breakfast and discovered a really good new place. Well, new to us – Fran’s has been around since 1978, and I had actually eaten there before. If you attended Reagan High you probably did too – it’s just across 290 on Cameron Road. It was brought to mind by an episode of “Friday Night Lights” which is filmed here in Austin; often setting scenes in real Austin places, like Appleby’s and the Broken Spoke – and Fran’s. The one they used was in South Austin, but one Saturday morning I looked up and saw the Fran’s in North Austin and we decided to try it.

The first thing you notice about Fran’s is that they don’t take credit cards or checks. It is a cash-only establishment. You seat yourself (and you go stand at the counter when you get ready to pay). Looking over the clientele, you notice a lot of older people, and it’s obvious from the banter between tables and with the wait staff (all three of them) that these people come here every Saturday. Maybe every day. There’s a smattering of good-old-boys; last week two next to us were talking about buying and selling at the local gun show. The dry-wall installers and the carpet layers eat here too as well as an elderly fellow in a suit and tie who just has to be the Pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist church down the road. Well, a Deacon at least. The crowd is pretty evenly divided among the big three racial groups – meaning Mom and I are in the minority.

The breakfast is what you would expect; eggs any way you want them and in any number. Pancakes, breakfast tacos, grits, biscuits, hash browns. You can of course get those with ham, bacon or sausage. And on weekends you can get my favorite, steak and eggs with 2 sides for $7.95. As the hand-lettered white-board sign said last week, “Try are week-end special!” Even after someone pointed out the grammatical error, the waitress still wasn’t sure what was wrong with the sign. Except for the ethnic mix, it might still be 1978 inside Fran’s.

And recently we tried Ken’s, the breakfast taco place on Cameron Road just before you get to Rundberg (you know, on the way to Wal-Mart). For years we have encountered the traffic jam of cars stalled out on Cameron trying to get into Ken’s tiny, tiny parking lot. The other morning, coming back from Wal-Mart, I saw that the sign said “Breakfast Taco’s All Day.” So I stopped and got two to go. I ate one for a late breakfast and had to save the other for lunch. They are so big you almost have to eat them off a plate; too hard to handle, otherwise. Only problem with Ken’s is the parking. We tried the other day, thinking that on a Friday morning at 9:30 surely we could get a parking place. Ended up at McDonalds. Sometimes that’s what happens when you are wild and adventurous.