#130: Kung Fu Saloon

The Bar

Kung Fu Saloon. 716 W 6th St, Austin, TX 78701

Visited 12/20/18 @ 6:30pm.

The Drink

Pickleback. Tito's vodka, pickle juice. $7.

The pickleback is still a standby, and I still don't like paying more than $5 for one. I still like Tito's vodka, haters be damned, and I definitely still like pickle juice as a chaser, so I was still at least mildly-enthusiastic about the bartender deciding that a pickleback was what best showed off the strengths of the bar. It was a solid rendition of what I would call an old classic, except that it was invented in 2006! In addition to a quick shot like this saving the bartender a lot of time thinking and crafting a cocktail, another advantage that serving a shot has for them is that you're almost guaranteed to order another drink right after it, either to wash the taste out of your mouth (unnecessary in this case, given how much I love pickle juice), or just to have something else to sip on while you converse. If that was the bartender's bet, it paid off, as we immediately got some Coors Lights while we engaged in some deep life/career discussions afterwards. 

The Crew

Aaron, Kyle.

Notes

Kung Fu Saloon is locally infamous due to its historically racist dress code policies, and also apparently for over-serving. They seem to have stopped being racist, however, so in the spirit of forgiveness we checked it out. It moved to this spot from just a block away on Rio Grande, where it was ineligible for inclusion in the Sixth Street Complete project due to not being directly accessible from Sixth. It's now in the lower half of what used to be Benji's, which I never went to, right below Green Light Social Club. Kung Fu Saloon essentially transported its original layout exactly to the new joint, keeping all of the adult drunkard amusements - skee-ball, connect four, shuffleboard, Jenga, arcade games, etc - in a more or less similar arrangement around the edge of the interior with the bar at the center. Kung Fu Saloon was also notorious on Sixth even apart from the racism for bro-y-ness (which come to think of it might not be unrelated to the racism), but happily during our visit it was mostly unpopulated and therefore unbro'd. I've talked before about my "it's not about the bar, it's about the patrons" mantra of quality, but I suppose at some bars the patronage is a reflection of the ownership; you get the clientele you're looking for. Maybe it's not fair to judge a bar by its worst moments... actually, that does seem pretty fair. I gave them a second chance, but you're totally within your rights not to, even if they were perfectly mediocre when we were there.