#4: Rounders Pizza

The Bar

Rounders Pizza. 1203 W 6th St, Austin, TX 78703

Visited 1/14/17 at 8:30pm.

UPDATE: Rounders has closed.

The Drink

Real Ale Devil's Backbone. $5.

Real Ale has long been one of my favorite local breweries. Devil's Backbone is a great Tripel style beer, 8.1% but not tasting like it. The real Devil's Backbone is a scenic highway out in the Hill Country that I've never driven on. Evidently I'm really missing out, and not just some nice scenery - there's ghost horses there too!

The Crew

Aaron, Travis.

Notes

Rounders was the first true test of my "every bar" goal. A pizzeria is obviously not a bar in the strictest definition of the term, yet at Rounders you can walk in and order either canned beer from a cooler case or drafts some from a small tap wall. As a house becomes a home through the act of living, a restaurant becomes a bar through the act of drinking. So that's exactly what we did.

As you can see from the showgirl legs in the picture, the interior design is something special. I'm not sure how long they've been around (as is common in Austin, trying to guess how old something is by how grungy it looks can be surprisingly difficult), but they're really serious about their Vegas theme and have put a lot of work into it over the years. You have to respect someone with good enough taste in movies to name their bar after a film. All the classic arcade games made this place very tempting to sit and stay a while, and the fact that they offer free garlic knots was also a powerful argument. But this was only the second stop of the night, and so after we finished our pints and the Texans nearly caught up to the Patriots by halftime, we left.