Caine Blog

Juxtaposition 1:

|| Elote Mexican Restaurant || My Apartment || Rocio’s Mexican Bakery ||

Above is a rough schematic of my block.  To the left of my apartment we have Elote, a restaurant/bar that serves expensive-ish Mexican food in a yuppified context, as well as decent sangria.  It is filled with non-Mexicans.

To the right of my apartment entryway - and below my actual apartment - is another Mexican eatery, La Bonita.  Although La Bonita is ostensibly a bakery, it’s really more of a social hub, where people gather to chat during the day and deal with drunk munchies once the sun sets.  Ah yes, and it’s open 24 hours a day, too.  The place also serves burritos, tacos, nachos, and so on, and although the last taco I had there was atrocious, the price of food here is maybe half that of Elote.

When I look upon this juxtaposition - and I do frequently, several times a day - I’m never quite sure how to frame it.  On the one hand, it’s easy to dismiss this as a bizarre result of neighborhood demographic changes (and a rather dark, anachronistic one, if you think about it): two restaurants serving the same food to a different clientele. But dig a bit deeper, and more emerges.

See, Elote isn’t really a Mexican restaurant.  It’s an ironic take on a Mexican restaurant that employs the tropes of the genre - sombreros, margaritas, occasional Spanish on the menu - in its overall art direction.  In this sense, the Mexican aura of Elote is similar to the arcade games in Barcade, or the crappy mini-golf course outside of Bushwick Country Club; gimmicks that reiterate and amplify the bars’ themes.

It is this distinction that best encapsulates the difference between La Bonita and Elote.  While the former has very obvious connections to a specific cultural heritage - and not just with regards to food, but also the social scene, the way the space is used by the community - the latter is simply decorated in a certain way, albeit colorfully.  The scene that’s emerging in Williamsburg is cultureless, detached from the past, constantly about the future.  People - I’m referring to a specific type of person here, the post-collegiate guy or gal - come here from all over and in doing so shed their past allegiances to a startling degree.  The culture that they (we) build is based on nostalgia and gimmickry: by reveling in artifice, residents can ignore cultural distinctions in favor of a blanket bohemianism.

There’s not necessarily anything wrong with that.  In a lot of ways it’s a triumph of creativity over convention: why not fill a bar with arcade games?  At the same time, a lot of places in Williamsburg have an Epcot vibe, and unlike, say, Paris, not many people want to visit Epcot over and over again.  Radegast Hall is perhaps the best example of this: a Central European-style beer hall that seems both immaculately designed and bridge-and-tunnel cheesy.  Just as a bunch of people wearing fez caps in Orlando does not Morocco make, a carefully composed take on some otherwise earnest setting (beer hall, Mexican restaurant, arcade) obviously can’t replace the real thing.  And the real thing never needs to shout aloud its intentions - it just is.

This brings me to the Levee, a pseudo-dive bar (aren’t they all?) located across the street from Radegast.  This place is always packed, in part because of its conspicuous lack of pretension and overt thematic content.  It’s just a bar, and an okay one at that.  And in a town where every bar evidently needs a story to go along with it, it’s nice to just go somewhere and have a drink without the costumes.  In the same way that it’s nice to just go somewhere and buy a piece of flan.