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Chewbacca Chicken Sandwich is what I usually get. While you’re there, enjoy the people-watching opportunities; the patrons are quintessential Austin. Look around and you are sure to see an elderly guy with a foot-long braided beard, a hippie girl with a homemade skirt, a computer geek who bears an uncanny resemblance to Richard Speck, a tattooed biker, and an employee with a red afro the size of a basketball, all sitting together at one table getting along and having a good time. They also play good music like Waylon and Willie, the Flatlanders, Tish Hinojosa, and basically anything that doesn’t get on the Kinkster’s nerves.
    THE NIGHT HAWK. For me, it is redolent of the dreams of youth and the smoke of life. In the early sixties I would sit with my college friends at the Night Hawk on the Drag, or the Plantation Restaurant or Uncle Van’s Pancake House, now long-dead places of business and enlightenment that exist only as smoky little rooms of the soul, where we drank endless cups of blue coffee and solved the problems of the world as we knew it. And I think at times that we knew the world better than perhaps we know it now. So the Night Hawk to me symbolizes youth as well as age, that decidedly human process of being old enough to realize, young enough to know.
    Like a rare and endangered species, the Night Hawk Restaurants once numbered four in Austin. Now there is but one left, at the corner of Burnet Road and Koenig Lane. Harry Akin, a former song-and-dance man, actor, and later mayor of Austin, founded the little chain and made it a chain before chains were a bad word. Now that the chain is gone, only the jewel survives. It is called the Frisco Shop, after a famous hamburger served by the Night Hawk since its inception in 1932. The Frisco Shop itself was established in 1953.
    Akin was bugled to Jesus in 1976, but his slogan lives on: “There’s Nothing Accidental About Quality.”
    Many of Akin’s former employees live on as well. More than ten of the Frisco staff have been with the Night Hawk organization for over twenty years. Many of the customers have been loyal patrons far longer than that, which is one reason I like the place so much. The demo-graphics are great. No matter how old you may feel, you’ll always find people older than you at the Frisco. This is good because the only other place with the same demographic is the Shalom Retirement Village.
    Harry Akin, indeed, was somewhat of a pioneer in civil rights. In the early sixties, he and the Night Hawk restaurants led the way in integrating Austin’s public dining facilities. He believed in the strange concept of judging people on their merits, and he was an equal-opportunity employer from very early on.
    Last, and probably most important of all, during the later years of his life the Frisco was my father’s favorite restaurant in the world. The food he always found delicious, the service excellent. The waitresses all loved Tom. They reminded me vaguely of the maids at the Chelsea Hotel in New York—so friendly and zealous they made it difficult for you to commit suicide.
    I came into the Frisco a few days after Tom had lost a year-long battle to cancer. When I left, one of the waitresses ran out after me into the parking lot with tears in her eyes. She had just heard the news that Tom was dead. She couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t, either. I’m not sure what her name was. Tom knew all their names.
    So I go to the Night Hawk whenever I can. It’s a bit of a walk down Yesterday Street. And I believe that if Texas were ever destroyed in a terrorist nuclear attack, three things would be sure to survive. In San Antonio, there’d be the Alamo. In Dallas, there’d be Tom Landry’s hat. In Austin, there’d be the Night Hawk on Burnet Road.
    THE KINKSTER’S TOP TWELVE AUSTIN RESTAURANTS
    (Subject to change at any moment because of my fickle nature and drastic mood swings.)
    Most of