Lunch in the Gump: El Paso Chili Cafe

Lunch in the Gump tends to patronize joints, preferring casual dump ambience to the fru-fru trappings of those white wine-sipping sissy food emporiums where all the fatcats like to gather when The Club is closed on Mondays. We Gumpers like our lunch greasy and we like it served up hot and fast, and we don't want it on a bed of cous-cous or with a layer of mango chutney on top. And it better be reasonable, because that lunch money didn't just fall out of our asses. Lunch in the Gump and the Lucky Sperm Club ain't got any overlapping membership. We don't want our vegetables pureed into baby food and we like regular old Morton's salt, for crying out loud, we don't want any damn sea salt and it and if it's steamed we want to know, well, couldn't you have deep-fried the sonofabitch? Or if it's a vegetable and you didn't cook it for at least three hours with a ham hock in there, then what in the hell was going through your feeble mind? Sheesh.

And just who do you think built this great country of ours? A bunch of mixed green eaters? Vegans? What got this country off its ass when it was stuck east of the Mississippi? Chili, that's what. The national dish of Texas and at the El Paso Chili Cafe they've got good chili, and you ought to go there and eat some.

We had a decent crowd of gumpers today, Binion, Show Dog, Matlock, He-Who-Has-No-Nickname, Bo Diddley, Tojo Yamamoto and yours truly. At El Paso you can get chili by itself or you can get stuff in your chili. Or you can get stuff other than chili and they'll put chili on it. Me? I had 'em add chopped onions and some kind of cheese to my chili. A couple of others had chili dogs and chili burgers and chili cheeseburgers and somebody even had chili fries. Although I didn't see it on the menu, I am sure you can get chili cheese fries with onions if you've got the cojones to ask.

Gumpers do not like to fart around at lunch. We like to catch up on the local gossip, eat and get going because we got things to do. But El Paso lays the hay right down there where the goats can get it:

You've got to respect that. If you are in a hurry, go to McDonald's and get you a frozen little wimp-ass burger. At El Paso, if you wait a few minutes you can get one of these:

BamaBing!'s phone has a crappy camera, but you get the idea. Note that this bad boy had to be cut in half. Binion asked for some lemon for his tea and although he didn't get any real lemons, he did get a shitload of ReaLemon.

The El Paso Chili Cafe is on the Eastern Bypass, but on the west side of the Eastern Bypass over by Lagoon Park, therefore inside the bypass so there were no parole violations.