Mas Tapas is racially delicious

In honor of the Spanish bacon dinner I enjoyed earlier tonight, and to make up for yesterday’s poorly written guts chronicle, I will tell the true story of a Mas evening two summers ago, witnessed pre-blog.

In summer, we sit on the patio at Mas, the trendy Spanish tapas restaurant two neighborhoods down. Everyone who first hears of Mas Tapas says, “Topless? It’s a topless bar?” It was only funny when I said it.

The restaurant was built on a run-down corner in the up-and-coming section of Charlottesville. Belmont was where the poor folks used to live before their neighborhood was gentrified. It was almost like rich folks started moving in so they could use the big city word “gentrified” without having to live in Brooklyn. Charlottesville struggles with a creative exodus to the five burroughs, but Belmont remains our haven of neighborhood stroller chic – an integrated six block radius within walking distance of downtown. Belmont is where houses climbed in worth by an average of $200,000 in two years, and where you still don’t want to get caught alone, sans pepper spray, in the middle of the night on certain streets. But Belmont is also where natives won’t bother you for hosting a keg party in the front yard of your renovated Victorian mansion.

So this Spanish tapas restaurant landed in the middle of Belmont and it was immediately hard to get a table on most weeknights. We arrived after 10 pm in the waning summer heat. The university was out on break, therefore we didn’t see the rich kids from the dormitories who had been turned onto Mas by a review in their school paper. When we arrived at the restaurant to meet our friends, recently engaged, we found out that we were celebrating the fiance’s birthday. They had already been sitting on the Mas patio for two hours, drinking sangria and eating bacon-wrapped dates.

So there we were. I immediately ate the birthday boy’s leftovers and then ordered more food. I commanded a cheap glass of white wine, my summer drink of choice, better suited to old ladies than to hot young bloggers. I may have garnished the chardonnay with ice cubes pilfered from my water glass.

While we ate and drank we noted that every once in a while a car would come flying around the corner and jet down one of the two Belmont streets that form the perimeter of the Mas patio. This didn’t seem unusual as people often get drunk and drive like maniacs around that intersection. I heard that once a car plunged through the Mas patio wall and several late-night diners had to jump out of the way to avoid being taken out. But I knew that the patio wall had since been reinforced with steel. I felt an immunity from trouble that can only be inspired by drinking multiple glasses of expensive wine in the chicest, whitest restaurant in the gentrified section of the town in which you were born.

Then a police car came cruising at emergency speed around the corner with its lights flashing and siren blaring. High speed cop chases were rare in Boboville, but I ignored the pursuit. I was on the Mas patio after all, insulated from all that craziness. Ten minutes later a hulking white SUV pulled up alongside the patio and the tinted passenger side window came down. The driver was a bearded man in his late 30s or early 40s. He wore a fluorescent t-shirt, donned a mullet haircut, and looked like the quintessential Nascar fan.

“Hey y’all,” he said, addressing everyone on the patio. Our late-night ranks had dwindled to about four tables – mine, a six-top of graduate students, a single man who was reading a book by candlelight over tuna and beer, and a young hipster couple. We all looked up at the SUV. The man continued. “I just wanted to let ya’ll know that there was a shooting down the street a little while ago and there are four black guys with guns going around the neighborhood shooting right now.”

I was surprised at this newsflash, but not shocked, as I had seen the cop car whiz around the corner recently. The night was hot, emotions were running high, people were getting married, my wine tasted delicious, and it seemed credible that some gun crime could be taking place nearby. I started to thank the SUV man for the information and wave him on, leaving me a chance to reflect on the news he had imparted and to decide if we were in any danger, if we should perhaps continue drinking inside.

But I didn’t have the chance. One of the graduate students at the six-top next to our table said, “Oh, so they were black, huh? Why does it matter that they were black? You think the black people are going to get you?” I turned around to examine the man who had just spoken. He wore a button-down collared shirt, khaki pants, and glasses – basically the whitest guy I could have imagined. And he sat next to one of the tannest, most loathsome, cookie-cutter sorority girls I could fantasize into a halter top. And he was drinking a mojito.

How interesting, I thought. Let’s call someone a racist who has stopped his SUV to warn us that there has been a shooting a block away and the perpetrators haven’t been apprehended yet and they are black (a helpful description if you ask me when there are people allegedly running around with loaded guns).

I highly doubted that a random shooting was going to take place that evening. I figured that anyone being pursued by the police wasn’t going to approach the yuppie restaurant’s patio and start picking people off. But I did appreciate a strange man stopping to tell us what was going on in the neighborhood so we wouldn’t look like fools with mouths full of bacon when the guns started blaring. Thanks for the heads-up, man. Now we can each decide what we want to do with the information.

But, no. Lily white graduate student with silver spoon and gold-plated chopsticks decided THAT was the moment to take a stand against racism, that particular moment, when it really mattered, when he was finishing his third $9 mojito with mint farmed from Southern Spain, when he was licking the oyster juice from his fingers. THAT was the moment the guy seized to impress the rest of the white yuppie crowd dining at Mas on a worknight with no one incurring a tab below $100 except maybe the aforementioned reader, with the fact that HE’S NOT A RACIST and that he TAKES OFFENSE to the SUV man describing four gentlemen as black because black is an offensive term all of a sudden.

The man in the SUV heard what the graduate student had to say and then responded, “Hey fucker. I was just trying to give you some warning. I hope you get shot first.” “Yeah, whatever man,” the graduate student said. Then the SUV sped off in the direction of the shooting. If tires could squeal in disgust, this is where they’d do it.

We stayed on the patio until 1 am, drinking and eating and spending more money. Occasionally a black man walked by the Mas patio, and the white men furtively watched him pass.