Most people never make it to Marfa. A few people never leave. Like a comet orbiting the sun, we are in the third group of people that are trapped by Marfa’s gravitational force. No matter how inconvenient, we keep getting pulled back to its remote west Texas location.
It’s another “why” we have trouble answering, like why do we go to the interior of the Big Bend Ranch? We came in 2018 in Betty when the NYT featured 36 hours in Marfa. We did a handful of the must do things on the list and left puzzled. In 2022 we came in Roxie and biked every street of the 1.6 square miles of town, digging deeper into the culture, eating, drinking and immersing in the avant garde art scene. We left loving. We came in 2024 in a tent, revisiting our memories and finding new inspiration from a new batch of curators. We think the why is that Marfa is intense. It’s people are creators. The only franchise is a Dairy Queen, a Stripes gas station and a Lowe’s grocery market. Everything else is original. Things aren’t imported from China. They are handmade in Texas or Mexico. Concerts don’t take place a stadium or club, they’re in someone’s back yard or in a bullbarn that you can only find from lat/long coordinates because there’s no street name. The food is beyond expectation. They are James Beard recognized or home cooked from scratch. We’re on our fourth iteration in the T@G and we are still absorbing the mystique of Marfa.
Our fave BBQ joint in the whole world, Convenience West, closed up after seven years. It was not for lack of business. The food creators just felt the tug to go and do another great thing. We’re waiting patiently for their next. No sooner than the door to CW closed, a new foodie Mecca, Bordo, opened across the street. These are no chain style food eateries. These are artistic, culinary creations presented by talented and eclectic chefs. It’s Michelin Star taste but with a portion size to feed a hungry ranch hand with a price for the working man.
Bordo bills itself as an Italian Deli but that hardly does it justice. Run out of a converted 1930’s auto service station, it doesn’t look like your average deli. Chef Serva was a 2025 James Beard Award finalist. That means that he is weird about food the way Picasso was weird about paint.
We ordered the Chef whim of the day, a beef braised in wine sandwich served on a fresh baked, stone milled, heirloom flour, wood-fired roll baked that morning, because, of course it was. We paired a side of the Chef’s crispy purple and yellow fingerling potatoes topped with lemon aioli. Then we tasted the food and cried. We simply could not fathom how food could be that good.
That’s Marfa in a nutshell. It’s a town full of half-crazy people who see no reason why whatever it is that they are doing should not be the most interesting rendition of that in the world. Sure, some of them miss. But, some of them don’t. What they do may be as simple as running a liquor store, but the same attitude applies. It has to be the most interesting liquor store stocked with the most unique distillates in the world. We picked up the makings for a Ranch Water Happy Hour later that afternoon using Cactus Liquor’s curated selection and the result was like nothing else we have ever had, because that’s Marfa.
With a concert and a hair stylist appointment on the books through the weekend, we are posted-up in our fave RV park, The Tumble In. Twice a night, the Union Pacific rolls through two hundred yards or so from our T@G domicile. The lonely train whistle can be heard a couple of miles out and the rumble of the freight cars can be heard for a long time as the multi-mile string passes by. It is the best night sleep you will ever have.
