The Year of No Sleep: A (Thus-Far Unfinished) Mix Tape
At Estrella, you never could guess whether your order of empanadas would arrive in 15 minutes or 55 minutes. You couldn’t predict whether the poblano-and-cheese filling in those little half-moons of dough would be sublimely seasoned or more arid than a lump of Play-Doh.
And the sort of garb your server would flounce over in during any given meal simply flouted all prognosticatory attempts. At dinner one night, your waitress’ order pad- and pen-laden hands would emerge from within a peasant blouse so voluminous it could fit two. The next lunch shift, she’d drop off your drinks in a white T-shirt tight enough and transparent enough to show off a matched set of nipple rings.
The only thing you could count on, really, was the omnipresence of music. One well-meaning restaurant reviewer tried to capture Estrella’s sonic ambiance by writing, “The music of the modern counterculture pounded through the room as the boots of Doc Martens-clad patrons shook the floor.” But that wasn’t the whole story. The stereo tucked beneath the bar in the dining room and the kitchen’s grease-encrusted boombox pumped out sounds so eclectic that categorization often eluded even the music-obsessed regulars.
Usually the weightless notes of Afro-Peruvian jazz perfuming the dining room clashed with the vintage power pop bouncing off the kitchen’s close walls. Once in a while, though, the separate soundtracks to each room’s activity – the pace most often frantic, occasionally languid, never any speed in between – melded into each other in a way that seemed to denote meaning. Or at least served as a late-’90s precursor to the current mashup revolution.
Side 1: The Kitchen
Within the cramped and cluttered kitchen blazed the soul of Estrella, bursting forth like the flaming corazon of a Mexican painted-tin ornament. Temperatures and temperaments ran to the dangerously hot and humid, especially during dinner rush. The emanations from the boombox distracted the sweat-drenched cooks from alternate uses of the knives with which they quartered quesadillas and filleted red snapper. More importantly, the music masked the frequent squalls of stovetop shouting from the patrons in the dining room.
Side 2: The Dining Room
Stepping through the doorway from the kitchen to the front of the house felt like skipping from mid-August straight to late October. The dining room was a sweat-free zone that the staff fought to maintain, no matter how many margaritas a wobbly-armed server sent splashing across the bumpy wooden floor. Brazilian el foro, Portuguese pop songs – during the Saturday-evening blitzkriegs of hungry diners from the suburbs, the songs on the stereo slipped around the tables without dropping a single English word on which to loop a distracting thought. The weeknights, owned by the not-quite-starving artists populating the surrounding neighborhood, belonged to drastically slashed drink prices and rock albums with serious indie cred.
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