Someday Has Its Last Service Tonight

There is an envelope in my kitchen drawer, under the dead batteries and the takeout menus for places that are also dead, with SOMEDAY written on it in blue Sharpie. As of this morning it holds sixty-three dollars and a Whataburger coupon that expired during the first Biden administration.

Tonight, Olamaie serves its last dinner.

I have never eaten there. I want that on the record before anybody mistakes this for a food review. I never sat at a table there or got the little speech from a server about how the kitchen thinks about things. Everything I know about the place I learned the way most Austinites learn about fine dining: secondhand, from somebody's cousin, in a parking lot, while holding a paper boat of something.

The facts, plainly, because KUT reported them and I'm not going to embroider: the Central Austin fine-dining restaurant scheduled its final service for July 19. The owners pointed to rent, labor costs, and a rough local restaurant market. That's it. That's the whole autopsy, and if you live here you could have written it yourself on a napkin.

The SOMEDAY Fund, an Audited History

The envelope was supposed to be for a nice dinner. A real one, the kind where you put on the shirt with buttons all the way down and park somewhere you have to think about. Here's how that went.

You'll notice the fund never once got close to the target. That's not a sad story. That's just how a someday restaurant works. You aren't supposed to arrive. You drive past on a Tuesday and think, one of these years, and that thought does a small useful job in your chest. It tells you that in this town, somewhere, a person is cooking with their whole attention. They aren't optimizing a QR menu or running a ghost kitchen out of a strip-mall unit behind a vape shop. They're cooking the way people used to build furniture.

You don't have to buy the chair to be glad somebody's still building chairs.

Who Was Supposed to Be Safe

Here is what's eating at me, worse than the expired coupon.

For about fifteen years the story we told ourselves went like this: the cheap places would die first. The trailer with the cash box, the dive with the cracked vinyl stools, the video store, the breakfast spot where the waitress called you "baby" and meant nothing by it. Those were the canaries. The expensive places, the ones with reservations and wine lists and press, were supposed to be the ones who won. They were the new Austin. They were what the cranes were for.

And now even they can't make rent.

So who exactly is this city being built for? The cheap places got priced out because they were cheap. The serious places are getting priced out because they're serious, because serious costs money, and the money has to go to cooks who also need to live somewhere within a reasonable drive of a stove. Last I checked, the reasonable drive is now from Kyle.

Rent took the cheap end. Rent and labor are coming for the expensive end. What's left in the middle is a landlord's idea of a restaurant: a concept, a lease that runs exactly as long as the tax abatement, a neon sign that says something like good vibes only, and a menu designed by a consultant in Scottsdale who has been to Austin once, for a conference, at the Hilton.

A Brief Word to the Building

I want to be careful here, because the people who ran that kitchen did the hard thing for years, and none of this is on them. My grievance is with the arithmetic.

If you own commercial property in Central Austin and you're reading this between pickleball sets: I'm not mad at you personally. I'm mad at the spreadsheet you inherited from a guy who inherited it from a fund. That spreadsheet assumes every square foot in this city wants to grow up and be a bank branch. Doesn't matter if it's a taqueria or a fine-dining room or the little upholstery shop that's somehow still on Burnet. The spreadsheet looks at all of them and sees a tenant who hasn't figured out how to pay more yet.

And to the broader civic machine, the one that loves to put pictures of chefs in the relocation brochures: you can't keep selling "world-class food scene" to the people moving here and then act surprised when the people cooking it can't afford the zip code. The brochure is not a lease. The brochure has never paid a line cook.

What I'm Doing With the Sixty-Three Dollars

I thought about this all morning, standing at the counter with the envelope while the box fan pushed hot air around like it was being paid by the hour.

I could go tonight. Show up at the door in the buttoned shirt, wave my sixty-three bucks, ask what that gets me on a closing night. It's a nice movie scene. It's also a good way to be the jerk who wanders into somebody's last service, the night the staff deserve to finish what they started without some sweaty stranger crying about his envelope.

So no. Here's the plan instead.

The sixty-three dollars is going to a restaurant this week, a real one, somewhere I can afford, where a person is cooking with attention. I'll tip like the rent is due, because it is, just not mine. The Whataburger coupon goes in the trash. I'll find a new envelope and write SOMEDAY on it again, and I'll pick a new place to drive past and feel a little hopeful about.

That's the part that scares me, honestly. Not losing the restaurant I never went to. Running out of places to want.

In a healthy city you can't afford everything. That's fine. That's normal. What's not normal is a city where the things you can't afford leave anyway, right behind the things you could.

Somebody's last plate goes out tonight in Central Austin. I won't be there. I'll be at my kitchen counter with a new envelope, a Sharpie, and the AC making that noise again.

Seventy-five degrees inside, by the way. Painter's tape still holding. Small victories.