Saturday, February 18, 2017

#45: Recess

The Bar


Recess. 222 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78701

Visited 2/18/17 @ 5pm.

The Drink



Noble Wolf. New Amsterdam vodka, watermelon juice, sweet and sour, simple syrup, lemon. $5.

Like I said in my review for Nightcap, I'm a big fan of melons. They didn't come as a garnish here, which would have been awesome, but it was real watermelon juice here and I appreciated that. Watermelon seems to be relatively underutilized in drinks, maybe because it reminds people of candy, or maybe bars find it has a low value to storage space ratio. Most of my alcohol-related watermelon consumption has come via the infamous vodka watermelon (although we made it with Everclear), so it's nice to see the script flipped a bit. I'm not sure what this drink has to do with wolves, however.

The Crew


Aaron, Rome.


Notes


Recess is all about games, as the name suggests. It's interesting to me how many bars on Sixth have games, and yet very few of them are "games bars" like Recess is. It's kind of like how you aren't a sports bar just by having a flat screen blaring ESPN17's coverage of junior college water polo and cheap wings, you also need overpriced pitchers of warm Miller Lite and fading jerseys of Premier League teams no one cares about tacked up on the wall. You know, the marks of true fandom. Recess has all kinds of games, from the inevitable classics like Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga to newer fare like Golden Tee and Area 51. However, me being the proud graduate of a nerd school that I am, the game I've spent the most time playing here is the oversized chess by the entrance. I'm not very good at chess, a real patzer, but I love playing it. If you simply must have a game to go along with your beer, drunk chess is about the best there is. Anyone can see that they're drunk when their Big Buck scores start dropping like Bambi's mother, but after a few beers, the peculiar combination of feeling like Napoleon because you remembered how en passant works and realizing that you're going to be mated in 2 for the third game in a row is a real crowd-pleaser.

Or you could stand around and watch people who are bad at Jenga interrupt everyone's conversations with their clamorous failures every 5 minutes. It's your call.

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