This Video Artist Is Making the Greatest Grilled Cheeses in the Middle of Nowhere

It’s 7:30 PM on Friday night and the Pizza Foundation has sold out of everything on the menu.

The thin-crust pizza spot is one of a handful of places to eat in Marfa, an isolated town in West Texas. Art nerds—myself included—visit this desert oasis to worship Minimalism at the Chinati Foundation and rest their heads on the same pillows James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor once did at El Paisano Hotel while they filmed Giant. Others come in hopes of catching a glimpse of the Marfa Lights, mysterious balls of fluorescent “light” that sporadically appear in the night sky. Many believe the glowing orbs to be UFOs, ghosts, or strange stars, but even scientists have zero clue what they are. And for some, this town is just a simple pit stop off Highway 67 on the way to somewhere else. But in this international tourist destination—where the regular population is just shy of 2,000 people—restaurant options are as minimal as the artwork.

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By 9:30 PM, the scent of oozing Cheddar and 1970s country tunes on an 8-track player waft from the doorway of a stucco building on a silent residential street that’s a five-minute walk from the Pizza Foundation. A dog’s bark ricochets from a few blocks down, but inside, video artist, musician, and restaurateur Adam Bork is about to save my evening.

Bork’s inimitable night owl establishment, the Museum of Electronic Wonders and Late Night Grilled Cheeses, is providing hungry locals, art tourists, and ranchers with some of the most inventive grilled cheeses you can find in Texas. But it’s not just the bread alone that’s bringing his patrons in from all over.

This alternate universe has almost zero 21st-century technology and is buzzing with electric wonderment. “Everything in the parlour is at least 30- to 50-year-old technology. I think that it’s good for people to get immersed in the past with the colors of my video art, vintage TVs, and old audio while you eat grilled cheese,” Bork explains. Thirty-plus vintage televisions spanning from the 1950s to 1980s broadcast Bork’s Color Field-inspired video artwork from a wall next to the kitchen, putting customers into colorful trances while they wait for the grilled cheese to melt on the griddle.

The parlour opened in October 2010, but it’s an offshoot of Bork’s food truck, the Food Shark. On weekdays, the vehicle roams Marfa’s dusty streets at lunchtime, feeding locals, art tourists, and celebrities like Queen Beyoncé specials like the “Marfalafel” falafel with hummus, homemade banh mi, and carne guisada tacos.

In a town where tumbleweeds and rattlesnakes outnumber humans, Bork has found a niche to create a business that feeds his culinary and artistic communities alike.

Above, Bork’s self-made commercial for the Food Shark.

The video artist moved to Marfa from Austin a little over 11 years ago and enjoys the remoteness of the high desert town. “The light is good here, and the sunsets are even better. It keeps a ton of people out because it’s hard to get to, which makes it both isolated and unique.”

His artistic hand influences everything that he touches, including his fleet of vintage cars, adorned with FOOD SHARK in handwritten block lettering. Bork parks the vehicles around town like culinary propaganda. All 15 of them pre-date 1977, and most can barely start even with the key in the ignition. “If I have to go out of town, someone has to give me a ride. I’ve made sure that I don’t have any contemporary Japanese cars that can reliably get me to another town,” says Bork.

When he’s not prepping for lunch service at the Food Shark or serving grilled cheeses into the wee hours of the morning at the parlour, Bork relaxes at home in his geodesic dome, the haven for his video art. “The structure of my home can handle up to four projectors on it at one time, which is really nice.” His video work unintentionally references Color Field artists like Rothko and Barnett Newman in moving form. “I realized after the fact that when I stepped back and watched them, they looked a lot like those Color Field artists.” But rather than a stiff artist’s statement, Bork considers his work as projects that he “created from the cosmos and put on multi-monitor screens.”

For Bork, creating videos, eating grilled cheese, hanging out, and watching these videos is all about setting a mood. And for the Museum of Electronic Wonders and Late Night Grilled Cheese Parlour patrons, the combination is a democratic equalizer. High school kids looking for something to do, art tourists, ranchers, and touring bands are able to connect over chicken-fried steak and mac-and-cheese grilled cheeses served on Plexiglas-Astro turf trays which serve as an icebreaker for strangers dining in the middle of nowhere.

Above, one of Bork’s Color Field-inspired videos.

The deluge of vintage TVs in Bork’s collection started simple in 1992, but has grown into an assortment with over 100 monitors. The Commodore 1702, a sturdy monitor from the 80s, the JVC videosphere, a TV from the 70s (a dead ringer for an astronaut’s helmet), the Panasonic TR-005 (a.k.a. “the eyeball”), the Philco Predicta (a machine from the 50s) and the Mod-era 3s-111w are his staple machines used to project videos at the parlour.

But it’s the ever-changing grilled cheese flavor combinations that ground the eatery back into contemporary West Texas: pimento; bacon with jalapeno; “Sloppy José,” Bork’s interpretation of a Sloppy Joe served with fresh salsa. The Motherfucker, a three-decker sandwich packed with an assortment of cheeses, meats, and vegetables, is a monstrosity fit for an appetite as large as the state.According to Bork, “The cooks don’t like to make the Motherfucker because it slows everything down, but it’s a good attention-getter.”

Running a business in the middle of nowhere has its downsides, and Bork has used some unusual tactics to lure in prospective customers. “One day, the Food Shark had catered lunch for Will Ferrell and his crew after they did an art tour. Later that day, I posted on our Facebook page that ‘special guest chef Will Ferrell’ was going to be making grilled cheeses at the parlour, and people came all the way from El Paso.”

Ferrell, however, did not, in fact, come by the Museum of Electronic Wonders and Late Night Grilled Cheese Parlour. “We tried to make it so that people couldn’t see that Will Ferrell wasn’t actually at the parlour. I told people, ‘Oh man, he’s a buddy, and he just wanted to come by and cook a few sandwiches, but he just left,’ but from behind the grill, we all kept saying things that we thought Will Ferrell would say. Sometimes people come from far away if there’s a special event, but I try to not do that anymore… to disappoint people.”

Bork’s businesses continues to flourish despite the ebb and flow of off-season art tourism, which doesn’t give him much time to work on his video art as often as he used to. “When I have down time, I’m working on something called The Marfa Mystery Channel,” Bork’s “TV channel” which includes footage of Bork and a friend going head-to-head in vintage car chases, caught on tape with go-pro cameras.

When asked about whether he believes in the Marfa lights, a common conversation starter at the Parlour, Bork has turned into a believer. “I used to be anti-Marfa-lights because I hadn’t seen them, but then I went to a UFO fest in the Presidio and they brought their fancy cameras and projectors showing that there is something different out there. Maybe the lights are life and energy that doesn’t happen anywhere else.”

The same is true for the restaurateur’s vision, which is busy lighting up Marfa every Friday night.

This post previously appeared on MUNCHIES in December, 2015.