Goodnight, Sweet Bandito: A Eulogy to the Downtown Amigos in Lincoln, Nebraska
Dearly beloved,
We are gathered here today to mourn the loss of not just an institution. Not just an icon. But something more potent. Something more powerful.
A place that left a mark on our hearts. And our gastrointestinal tracts.
We are gathered here today, with tears in our eyes and grease upon our fingers as we lift them skyward in a spicy nacho-cheese flavored search for answers and peace.
To say goodbye. And to say farewell.
But, also, to say thank you.
For this is not the time to weep into your complimentary brown napkins. No! It is not a time to weep over how the downtown Amigos died, (*Author’s note: probably millennials, tbh) but a time to remember how it lived.
For it was on this corner, here, where the paved tributaries of Q St and 14th made sweet, sweet, municipal coded love and gave birth to a tile-roofed monolith that landed on this intersection like the Pilgrims upon that rock at Plymouth so many years ago.
It was not just the streets that intersected in this alchemic throughway of youthful verve and delectable nostalgia: it was our lives that crossed these paths.
Here where I ate a cheesy bandito meal, no beans — always no beans — and marveled at the weirdness of the circular, kiddie-pool-looking stained glass windows. Here where I threw pennies into their indoor fountain and wished for an employee in a green shirt with a off-grease trim to offer me a Dum-Dum so that my older brother could then call me a dumb-dumb.
It was here where our parents would drop us off in their 1998 mini-vans so that our friends wouldn’t see us and make fun of us for the most egregious of youthful sins: having parents. Here where we would eat a full meal, before walking over to watch 2Fast 2Furious at the fraternal spiritual twin next door, the Starship 9.
And, here we would return to eat another full meal after the movie had concluded. Because: metabolism.
It was this place. This mecca of melt. This palace of pancreatic punishment where the forebears of Uber — what we used to call “that one sober person in your friend group” — was always forced to drive. There where you would pay them not via an app, but by ordering them the extra cheesy on the number 5 for a dollar more.
Here where my friend once attempted to order a beer in the drive-thru and here where former Husker player Chad Kelsay once did made this incredible drunken power move:
It’s a place where drunks and insomniacs and suits and teens could all bask together in the yellow glow of that swooping sombrero(?) “A” and get a bag of tortilla chips with cinnamon sugar all over them. It was a place for low-slung, listless nights, when the only people inside were the on-duty cop and 4 high school kids calling girls while they split nachos.
It was, in short, a very Lincoln kind of place.
All ironic pomposity and faux-grandeur aside: I’ll miss it.
Forget just three Amigos. At this place? During that time? We were legion.
It is survived by many of the same restaurants, but in other locations. The memorial service will be anytime you get liquored enough to justify buying yourself multiple Crisp Meat Burritos at 12:15 AM or are so hungover that you either need an IV drip from a licensed medical professional or cheap tacos served by a kid that’s definitely 17-years-old.
In lieu of flowers, please donate money to yourself. And go buy a Cheesy. No Beans.
