“Do you want to drink beers and drive a 1969 Pontiac around the dirt track?”
“Of course.”
Myself, David Branch, and Adam Bork –– former owner of the recently closed Casita Bar and current operator of the “Ghost of Food Shark” –– crowded onto the bench seat of the rotten old car, shoulder to shoulder. Bork floored it and we took off in a cloud of dust, sluicing at medium but adequate speed around the corners of the alluvial desert plain in Lobo, Texas, where he’s parked his trailer and innumerable fleet of variously disintegrated vehicles.
Flying over the compacted erosion path of a proto-arroyo, the car bottomed out, and I cackled as I spilled beer all over myself and companions. Bork slowed and looked up with care: “Don’t hold the bottle to your teeth. They’ll chip.”
The culinary worlds created by Mr. Bork are fluid. Casita Bar was a speakeasy first located in a shack behind the restaurant Cochineal. The Food Shark was a school bus turned food truck. Then in 2018, Bork and Chris Ramming combined forces to open Food Shark Land at Casita Bar in a mid-century house on the west side of town. This venue served a lot of Modelos and imaginatively topped tater tots until 2023, when it sadly passed on into the restaurant hereafter.
What is the Ghost of Food Shark? It’s definitely not a new restaurant, and so far as I can tell it isn’t Bork’s desert hideout, either. It seems more so to be the spirit animating him through this period of his life –– colored with a touch of regret and sadness, but also creative, free and energetic. The Ghost is with him at the compound in Lobo, and it follows him into Marfa when he periodically rolls into town and opens the former Casita Bar as a kind of salon.
The Ghost is a productive spirit. Bork has produced and shown a series of forced perspective art videos of miniature people standing to attention while the Food Shark bus explodes in a cloud of fireworks.
Long neglected cars are being fiddled with. Walls of antique mid-century modern pod televisions are being assembled next to favored yuccas. He wears what look to be swim trunks with sandals and is very dusty. The longest amount of time he says he has spent without visitors is 14 days.
There is also food. After our vehicular excursion, Bork offers to make hamburgers. “I don’t have a lot, but there’s enough for two, I think.” He fills a grill with mesquite charcoal, and, wearing plastic shopping bags on his hands, mixes leftover grilled vegetables into ground beef patties. He apologizes for not having ketchup, just mustard and Tony’s Creole Seasoning. We assure him this is fine, and work our way through our, and then his, beers while the burgers cook. After a longer than expected time, Bork gets frustrated and piles a number of small kindling sticks onto the coals. Flames erupt, and dinner is finished in shorter order.
“I’m sorry, they’re not the same size. Sam, you get the small one.”
I’m not sure he realized he was talking to The Big Bend Sentinel’s new food columnist, but I can excuse the slight as he and Branch have known each other for longer.
I am really hungry. The sesame-topped bun is perfectly toasted, and the burger is crisply charred on the outside; well done, but still desirably moist, possibly due to the vegetables that have steeped their wetness and flavor inside of it. The Tony’s seasoning is salty, and the quantity of mustard I apply is excessive. The experience is delicious.
After dinner, Bork leads us on an exploration of the property, walking through creosote, stopping at his favorite nooks and crannies. We walk through a field of scrubland and .22 rifle targets that is also inexplicably strewn with lemons; I don’t know if they were real or fake, and I don’t know why I didn’t ask any questions. It begins to get dark, and he takes us to his stage, a pipe wagon that his neighbor gave him, upon which Bork has placed a tableau of table lamps and speakers. I don’t take any pictures because he has put up signs that say “No pictures!!” but the sight is beautiful. Sitting with his back to Chispa Mountain, he plays lap guitar. Branch and I lean against a truck that seems like it probably works, and listen.
Ghost of Food Shark Burgers:
This is a recipe for a hamburger. You could obviously do it differently if you wanted, but this is the way Adam Bork did it. Personally I might add a serrano pepper into the veg mix.
Ingredients:
- 1 medium sized onion, medium dice
- 1 red bell pepper, medium dice
- 1 tablespoon oil
- 1 pound of ground beef
- salt & pepper
- sesame kosher buns
- yellow mustard
- Tony’s Creole Seasoning
Instructions:
- Heat the oil on medium low and sauté the diced onion and red bell pepper with salt and pepper until soft but not browned.
- Let the vegetables cool a bit, then combine with the ground beef and mix together with your hands. Lacking gloves or access to running water, Bork does this by covering his hands with two shopping bags. Salt and pepper the resultant burger patties.
- Cook the burgers at a low temperature until you get annoyed, and then add a bunch of sticks onto the fire and quickly achieve a state of char. Toast the buns concurrently with this final step.
- Apply condiments heavily.
All the strange things that sound like heaven.