#58: Maggie Mae's

The Bar

Maggie Mae's. 323 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78701

Visited 2/28/17 @ 8:30pm.

The Drink

Cucumber mule. Effen cucumber vodka, ginger beer, lime. $5.

It's pretty cool that you can get a new twist on a fancy cocktail even in a bar that sees thousands of typically indifferent drinkers per night who just want cheap beer and jäger shots. Yes, it's in a plastic cup, and no, it's not the greatest drink you'll ever have. But as a symbol of how much standards have risen in just a few years, it's worth noticing; just imagine getting a cucumber anything here a decade ago. It's true that economic growth has been stagnant lately, at least as measured by GDP, and yet the improvement in general lifestyle comforts has been underrated, at least if you're in a city like Austin that, if anything, has been getting nicer too quickly for many of its inhabitants. A traditional econometric exercise of measuring inflation would start by trying to define our drink inputs as substitutes or rival goods, and what an appropriate Gross Drinking Product deflator would be, and so on, but as far as I'm concerned, the ability to get not just a regular Moscow Mule but a highly drinkable cucumber variant for only five bucks on a Tuesday night is as inspiring an ode to the progress of civilization as you're likely to find. You could also see it as a sign of incipient terminal decadence as well, but we're all optimists here, right?

The Crew

Rome, Travis, Aaron, Davis, Sonali, Vince.

Notes

I can't count the number of times I've been to Maggie Mae's. Curiously, the majority of those times has been on the urging of someone not from Austin who somehow decided that Maggie Mae's was their favorite bar. Not that Maggie Mae's isn't a perfectly fine bar - in fact, with its cheap drinks, multiple stages for music, and fine rooftop patio, it's certainly in the upper tier of Dirty Sixth bars - I just wonder how someone decides that it's their favorite. To me, a favorite bar has to involve some kind of intimate personal connection, either by being a regular, knowing the owner, meeting someone special there, or having some kind of truly transcendent night there. By that measure, no bar on Sixth is or likely will ever be my favorite. However, if you think of it as a kind of Schelling point, it makes a lot more sense. It has just about all the attributes of a Dirty Sixth bar anyone would ever want, and so in that light, it's certainly as good as any other and in fact better than most. And of course, me thinking about favorite bars as a local is not at all how a non-Austinite would think: maybe cheap drinks, live music, and endless people-watching from the rooftop patio down at the street below is more than enough for a visitor. Or even a native - I've certainly had my share of good nights here, listening to one band or another, watching the stream of drinkers above match the torrent below. We were a bit too early for that flume of inebriates on this particular night, but there's always another night on Sixth.