#109: COLLiDE atx

The Bar

COLLiDE atx. 1802 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78702

Visited 8/2/17 @ 9pm.

UPDATE: COLLiDE atx has closed.

The Drink

Mai Tai. Plantation pineapple rum, Flor de Caña rum, orgeat syrup, lime. $9.

The Mai Tai is an interesting drink, and like all interesting drinks its history is a tangle of lies. It was unquestionably invented somewhere in California, which is about all that's definitively known: who first crafted it, at which bar, and using which ingredients are all under heavy dispute. It seems like history has deemed the Trader Vic's version the official winner, and so by cocktail cladistics every subsequent Mai Tai can trace its heritage to that humble tiki restaurant in Oakland. Collide's version uses Plantation for its dark rum and Flor de Caña for its light rum, but I didn't find out if they made their own orgeat syrup. Fun orgeat facts: the word "orgeat" is not pronounced "oar-geet", but "oar-zhay" in the French manner, and is cognate to the Spanish "horchata", although orgeat is primarily almond-based and not based on rice like its Hispanic cousin. An official Mai Tai should probably have curaçao in it as well, but I either forgot to record it or they declined to include it, and I don't recall tasting any; regardless, it was quite nice, and well worth the price.

The Crew

Aaron, Vince.

Notes

Collide (enough of this "wacky" branded capitalization) is another project from Dunlap ATX, the people who brought you half of Rainey Street. It replaced Burn Pizza very recently with a lot of different things at once: a co-working space, an art gallery, a restaurant, a live music venue, and oh yeah - a bar as well. They were in the latter two modes when we visited on a Wednesday night, hosting an acoustic guitar musician in the open space to the right of the entrance, with a number of patrons listening attentively around him and everyone else sprinkled throughout the interior or gathered outside on the picnic tables. I have to say that even if they do have a conceptual identity crisis it still works for them; we enjoyed our drinks, had some great conversation with fellow patrons, and even dug the tunes. Lots of bars try to firmly brand themselves as one or another of the basic bar archetypes - sports bar, college bar, etc - but there's value in trying to appeal to wide audiences as well. To put it in the kind of highbrow literary terms my readers have come to endure, some bars are foxes and some are hedgehogs, and while any individual bar might do better sticking to one strategy or the other, both foxes and hedgehogs coexist in nature just fine. We will see how long Collide will last in the rapidly evolving East Sixth ecological biome.