#148: Bar Peached

The Bar

Bar Peached. 1315 W 6th St, Austin, TX 78703

Visited 11/20/19 @ 8pm.

The Drink

Beetlejuice. Tequila, beet, lime, cilantro. $11.

There's not a lot of beet cocktails out there, but luckily Bar Peached did the world a flavor and stepped up to the plate. It's hard to describe the taste of beets other than by saying that they taste "like beets", so I won't really try - just imagine "warm, earthy, not quite savory", and other handwave-y terms like that. The other ingredients suggest a Mexican cocktail, but the beets evened them out, leaving a cocktail that was really good even I couldn't put my finger on exactly what made it so good. It was like taking a bunch of paint colors and mixing them together, but instead of a brown sludge I got an attractive burgundy cocktail with enough notes of the other ingredients that I didn't hesitate to order another one.

The Crew

Misty, Travis, Karen, Aaron.

Notes

Normally when I review these bars, I try to review them primarily as bars, but even though it's perfectly possible to saunter up to the bar and just drink here like you would at any other bar, Bar Peached is the West Sixth spinoff of the Peached Tortilla Asian/Southern fusion restaurant up north on Burnet, and we were here for the food. It replaces the sadly departed Winflo Osteria with a slightly different menu than its parent restaurant but with the same neat mix of cuisines. We had a bunch of things:

• Mapo bolognese
• Malaysian fried rice
• Crab chili toast
• Banh mi tacos
• Brussels sprouts

All were wonderful. The interior itself isn't really changed much from the Winflo Osteria era - they took out the knickknacks, but kept the hardwood. The exterior patio level looked to be unchanged. I probably wouldn't come here for casual drinking, but I highly recommend Bar Peached as a nice meal out with drinks.

#147: Swedish Hill

The Bar

Swedish Hill. 1120 W 6th St, Austin, TX 78703

Visited 11/20/19 @ 7:30pm.

The Drink

Savoie Shrub 75. Comoz blanc vermouth, lemon, strawberry balsamic shrub, sparkling wine. $10.

At the time we visited, the newly reopened Swedish Hill had not yet gotten their full liquor license up and running due to whatever goofy TABC regulation covers that situation, so all the cocktails were of the fortified wine or less variety: no liquor. They promised they'd have real liquor cocktails very shortly, but in the meantime you can of course make some perfectly passable drinks without getting into the hard stuff. The name of the drink is an obvious nod to the French 75, but without the ability to use gin, Swedish Hill decided to go off-script, as the drink shares only the lemon and sparkling wine with its more famous namesake. The vermouth is an interesting choice; the blanc style (which Comoz evidently pioneered themselves) is about halfway between the dry style you see in martinis, and the sweet style you see in Manhattans. The other ingredient that stood out to me was the shrub, which is a fruit syrup made with sugar and vinegar, and that strawberry balsamic flavor combined with the semi-sweet vermouth made for a pleasant drink. I hope they get their license soon, but this will tide you over well until then.

The Crew

Aaron, Karen, Misty.

Notes

The bakery Sweetish Hill had been around for my entire life at this quaint little "mini downtown" stretch of West Sixth near Blanco Street until very recently, when it was bought, closed, renamed, and reopened just a few months ago by the steadily growing McGuire Moorman empire as a new central bakery hub for their portfolio of interesting restaurants around town. The name change is a bit confusing to me - it could be a reference to the historic Swedish Hill is part of town, even though that's on the east side - but the new bakery is a nicer and fancier upgrade of the original 1975 joint. They've spiffed-up the interior bakery/deli sector right when you walk in with inviting product cases, and the outdoor patio has gotten a tuneup. I know that the the bar/dining area off to the right looks a little under-decorated and over-mood-lighted in the photo, but in person it's not nearly so bleak, just clean. We didn't eat here, but all the food looked fantastic.

#146: The Upside

The Bar

The Upside. 1108 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78702

Visited 9/14/19 @ 8pm.

UPDATE: The Upside has closed.

The Drink

Peruvian National. Portón Acholado pisco, pineapple, apricot, lemon, egg white, Chuncho bitters. $13.

This was the first pisco sour I've been served on the journey so far, and for the most part it stuck to the script with the exception of swapping out the traditional simple syrup for pineapple and apricot, which was an inspired choice. Pisco is evidently having a moment, and Portón Acholado is one of the newer piscos attempting to capitalize on the pisco wave. Whiskey sours are by far the more familiar genre of sour cocktail, but pisco, being distilled fermented grape juice, goes just as well or better with the sourness of the lemon and the sweetness of the syrup, or pineapple and apricot in this case. It turns out that Chuncho bitters is a specifically Peruvian brand of bitters, and while I had not known that there was such a thing beforehand  I do think it was a good call to use it over the old reliable standby of Angostura bitters. The decorative arrow on top represents the "upside" of the bar's name; it's a nice touch, and seems tailor-made for Instagram (or this blog), even though whenever I spend too much time thinking about objects specifically designed for pictures my mind naturally goes to the "most photographed barn in America" from Don DeLillo's novel White Noise. Regardless, it was a fine cocktail when I stopped taking pictures of it and actually drank it, and it deserves all the hashtags I'm sure it's gotten.

The Crew

Travis, Michael, Aaron, Karen, Mark, Neil, Kathryn.

Notes

As I alluded to when I talked about Sixth & Waller on the ground floor, The Upside is the where the final boss of the hotel would be if this were a kung fu movie, because it's a high-end restaurant with a bar and view to match. If you were determined to spend your entire day within the walls of the East Austin Hotel, which I'm sure would delight the management, Sixth & Waller is where you'd have breakfast and a Bloody Mary, Pool Bar is where you'd day-drink, and The Upside is where you'd end the night with a nice dinner and cocktails. It's not quite a rooftop bar since it's not on the top of the highest floor, but it's easier to call it that than a veranda bar or penultimate floor balcony bar or whatever since it is in fact mostly open to the air above, and mostly importantly it offers the main point of a rooftop bar: a great south-facing view of Sixth Street and the city vistas beyond. We didn't eat here, but similarly to downstairs they have an international fusion-y menu that looked pretty good and would probably have been great, since the food at Sixth & Waller was excellent. The main bar area has a vaguely North African/Middle East vibe to it, and in addition to the outdoor seating there's a contemporary art-bedecked common dining room with a big TV that was showing the Longhorns busily destroying the Owls, which as you can see was helping our mood immensely (well, that and the several drinks we'd already had). 

Pro tip: I hope you remembered where the restroom was on the ground floor, because there isn't one up here. A cleverer writer than me would probably say something witty like "it was the only downside of The Upside", but you probably needed the exercise of going back down and up the stairs again anyway.

#145: Pool Bar

The Bar

Pool Bar. 1108 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78702

Visited 9/14/19 @ 7:30pm.

UPDATE: Pool Bar has closed.

The Drink

Neon Chi Chi. 4 white rum blend, blue curaçao, pineapple, vanilla bean coconut cream, lime flash. $12.

I'm gradually learning that "tiki" is just industry shorthand for "sweet rum drink", so by that metric this is basically the ultimate tiki cocktail, since it's made with a house blend of not one, not two, not three, but four different rums. The bartender didn't know offhand exactly which specific rums went into this particular mishmash, but that just made me smile a little bit - you know all the time and care and thought and artistry and blah blah blah that goes into making blended whiskies? What if instead of doing all that, you just dumped a bunch of rums into a glass? I don't want to diminish the artistry of the bartender here, who was a perfectly pleasant guy (as you can tell from our group photo, we made life easy on him and just got one each all the way around), but it makes you think about what makes for an appropriate drink for specific times and places. Here, floating atop the abundance of rum was a mixture of closely-related sweet flavors, like a painter going through a blue period who decided to lean heavily on one particular area of his palette. Convenience is another virtue of the tiki tradition as well, I'm sure. Aside from having a bit too much ice it was a solid cocktail, perfect for a summer evening poolside.

The Crew

Mark, Karen, Michael, Aaron, Travis, Kathryn, Neil.

Notes

The second stop on our quest to drink at each bar of the hotel was Pool Bar, which is right by the interior pool, although not quite close enough to swim up to it. Something about a swim-up pool bar has always felt like the ultimate in decadence to me, and though you're cruelly forced to climb onto dry land and sit barside to get your next round of drinks, the appeal of having a convenient cocktail source remains, and it's probably for the best anyway that you can't just chug booze from plastic cups while splashing about - that's a spring break move. Pool Bar is underneath a covered roof for protection against the elements in a semi-enclosed area away from the poolgoers, so as a barfly you do get basically the best of both worlds as you enjoy close bar access without having to dodge soaking wet swimmers wandering around. There weren't a ton of people around when we visited, so our people-watching was limited, but I can see this bar being a fun hangout spot during the dog days of summer, as long as you can handle the cocktail prices. We couldn't linger, however - we had more drinking to do!

#144: Sixth & Waller

The Bar

Sixth & Waller. 1108 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78702

Visited 9/14/19 @ 6pm.

UPDATE: Sixth & Waller has closed.

The Drink

Isla Buck. Vodka, vinho verde, hibiscus, ginger, cucumber, lime. $10.

This was just a really great and inviting cocktail, despite the ominous Shining-esque red tint that the hibiscus gave it. Vodka being a neutral spirit, all of the flavor action came from the other ingredients, which were all tasty and refreshing. Vinho verde is a bubbly Portuguese wine, and though it comes in several different types, the kind that Sixth & Waller uses is the friendlier, more effervescent variety that gives drinks a little carbonation along with the mellow wine flavor. Coupled with the ginger, cucumber, and lime, this was a slightly sweet - but not too sweet - cocktail that left me raring to go for another. As luck would have it, we were waiting around for the rest of our crew to arrive, and our bartender happily helped us kill time by making us about 1 of everything from the rest of the cocktail menu. I highly recommend the Pisco Punch and their version of a sazerac (which uses whiskey AND cognac instead of the traditional either/or), but the Isla Buck is a killer first-round round.

The Crew

Aaron, Travis, Michael.

Notes

Much like the Arrive Hotel just down the street, the similarly just-opened East Austin Hotel has thoughtfully included multiple different bars within its walls, which means that the interested drinker has to put in just about the bare minimum of effort possible to check out another drinking scene should the current one grow stale. Sixth & Waller, conveniently named after the intersection of the hotel's street address, is at the ground floor just off to the left when you walk into the lobby from Sixth Street, like the first level of a pagoda of drinking. It's primarily a diner-ish restaurant with a focus on fusion-y dishes (though don't sleep on their burger), but it also offers a solid cocktail listing. I felt right at home when we sat down - something about the bright lighting from the south-facing windows, the warm wood walls, and even the blue-tiled tabletops felt very comforting. Austin is of course famous for diners, and a newcomer like Sixth & Waller is just a cleaner, nicer version of the old standbys, though it's sadly missing the crucial ingredient of 24-hour migas availability. Maybe someday. In the meantime, it's an excellent place to grab a cocktail and build up a solid food foundation for the next drinking levels.

#143: Valhalla eSports Lounge

The Bar

Valhalla eSports Lounge. 710 B W 6th Street, Austin, TX 78701

Visited 8/31/19 @ 11:30pm.

UPDATE: Valhalla has closed.

The Drink

Gamer Fuel. Deep Eddy vodka, Midori, Mountain Dew, lemon, sour candy. $10.

As we've all learned from long experience with superhero movies, anything this unnatural shade of green will usually either kill you instantly or give you some pretty cool powers. In the case of drinks, it could also give you a hangover that will make you wish you were dead, but more likely it will make your teeth hurt and cause your dentist's eyes to transform into big dollar signs the next time you come in for your checkup. Gamer Fuel is the flagship of Valhalla's line of "boozy slushes", which taste exactly like what they sound like. The real highlight of this drink was the Sour Patch Kids-esque candy ribbon that I wisely saved for the end - the tartness of the candy was a welcome distraction from the melon sweetness of the Midori, which I have liked in other drinks but wears out its welcome over time as you're heroically attempting to empty your glass, like a figure from Greek mythology whose punishment for getting on Hera's bad side was to eternally drain the Aegean with a straw (no, I'm not bitter I got another comically oversized novelty frozen drink, why do you ask?). I wish I had come at happy hour when this would have been half price, but at least it was plenty strong.

The Crew

Elijah, Aaron.

Notes

Valhalla had just opened when we visited, replacing the bar-by-numbers predictability of J Black's with a gamer bar. A gamer bar? Austin already has Recess a few blocks down on Sixth, Kung Fu Saloon practically next door, and Vigilante Gastropub up north, but this is an esports lounge, which caters to a different breed of gaming enthusiast entirely. I am not really a gamer, so I'm not the best person to judge how well this bar fulfills its mission of providing a gamer-friendly drinking environment (as you can see, we were fresh off of watching Texas beat Louisiana Tech, a sport which is more my speed), but it was friendly enough for civilian drinkers. The typical sports bar ring of screens is supplemented with consoles you can play, and there are little gaming niches off to the sides. If you actually follow esports then this seems to be the place to go, as according to our bartender they plan to have watch parties for tournaments and so on. Nobody was playing much games when we were there, instead celebrating the Longhorns win with us, but that was just fine by me.

#142: Vixen's Wedding

The Bar

Vixen's Wedding. 1813 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78702

Visited 8/24/2019 @ 9pm.

UPDATE: Vixen's Wedding has closed.

The Drink

Goan Places. White rum, pineapple, lime, cucumber. $10.

On paper, this is yet another hurricane, minus the dark rum. Call it a cyclone? But good craftsmanship always elevates an otherwise off-the-shelf cocktail, and this was potent and smooth and very refreshing. I won't lie - this was not our first stop of the night, so our palates were not in the most discerning mode. But you don't have to be sober to appreciate a good cocktail (almost the reverse, actually), and after the bartender assured us that very few people only ordered one of these house specialties, the drink easily lived up to its reputation. A neat feature of this bar is that there are all kinds of fascinating liquors from across India, so if like me you had no idea that India had a rich distilling tradition, much less of rum, which is originally from the Caribbean, you should ask about their selection and get some of whatever looks most interesting. After we'd downed our Goan Places and convinced our bartender that we were still good for one more, we tried a fantastic rum from Bengal, putting us far past three sheets to the wind and into full monsoon mode.

The Crew

Travis, Kathryn, Neil, Aaron.

Notes

The last stop of the night! Vixen's Wedding is a Goan restaurant, which perhaps the clearest example yet that Sixth Street has come a long way from the dependable days of $1 Lone Stars with $3 you-call-its. Goa is an Indian state that was occupied by Portugal for over 450 years, making it roughly the Indian equivalent of Macao, and just like in China the mixture of European administration over Indian substrate produced new styles of food, culture, and even techno (I've probably listened to Paul Oakenfold's Goa Mix dozens of times over the years). Vixen's Wedding is clearly the showpiece of the three bar/restaurants in the hotel, by far the nicest on the inside with plenty of  neat cloth hangings and wall art. Cuisine is usually one of the few good byproducts of colonization, and their food is fantastic - we had one of basically all of their appetizers, plus some absolutely spectacular lamb that would have been worth raving about even if we all hadn't been pretty drunk at that point. I've written before about how hotels used to play a much larger role in culinary invention before the democratization of food with the quick-service restaurant category. Those days of hotels being the undisputed trend-setters are long gone, but restaurants like Vixen's Wedding can still be both a compelling destination for locals as well as an extremely convenient eatery for guests even if it means that they'll miss out on a chance to eat more typical "Austin cuisine". That in itself is an opportunity to ponder the intriguing paradox of diversity where as each city gets more diverse on the local level by importing people and cuisines they increasingly begin to resemble one another on the global level, but I digress - you should check this place out. 

#141: Gin Bar

The Bar

Gin Bar. 1813 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78702

Visited 8/24/2019 @ 8pm.

The Drink

Gin martini. Plymouth gin, dry vermouth, twist. $15.

I've always been a proud gin drinker, so when I gave my spiel to the bartender about wanting the drink that best represents up the bar - a gin bar named Gin Bar - I felt like I couldn't lose. And I didn't - I got served the bar's rendition of the basic gin martini, which as we are occasionally reminded is the only real kind of martini. Gin Bar has dozens of different varieties of gin (and a handful of non-gins for those patrons who either got really lost or were dragged along unwillingly), carefully curated to give discriminating patrons the opportunity to experiment with new gins. 

I am all in favor of gin experiments. In college I once did some "gin science" with a friend, where we tried to make the ideal martini out of what we had on hand, to find the optimal synthesis of gin + vermouth. We tried each combination of Hendrick's, Bombay Sapphire, and New Amsterdam with both sweet and dry vermouth. The results of our experiment are lost for all time, since we quickly got stupidly staggeringly drunk, but Gin Bar is probably the next-best place to replicate those trials, though I would recommend a slower pace. My martini used Plymouth gin, a term which has the rare distinction of going from being a generic regional product name to a single specific brand instead of the other way around (like Xerox, Kleenex, or Q-Tips). My bartender mixed it at 5 parts gin to 1 part dry vermouth, so nice and strong. It was basically a perfect martini, and if the price seems high, just consider it an investment in science. Ginnovation doesn't come cheap.

The Crew

Travis, Neil, Kathryn, Aaron.

Notes

Given my enduring love for gin, I've always thought it was interesting how little of a role it seems to play in the drinking portfolios of most people I know, and hence the city at large. Though Austin has plenty of bars with big gin collections, there's not a bar that makes gin its specialty - we have whiskey bars, vodka houses, mezcalerías, and so on, but no gin joints. But it's hard to imagine Rick Blaine sighing over a double IPA, and so Gin Bar has arrived to close the gap, although this rooftop bar couldn't be more different than the dark, dingy dive he owns in Casablanca. Gin Bar, which I can tell will absolutely dominate SEO for any gin-related search queries, is an open, friendly, airy bar that likes to educate people on the wonders of gin rather than just provide a stool to sulk at. Its placement at the top of the stairs gives both convenient access from the street as well as a better view of the surrounding area, with plenty of seating off to the side to chat with your friends at. There's something evocative about a rooftop bar that stirs the mind as you're standing at a side rail, sipping your cocktail and pondering the vista in front of you; Gin Bar is as far from Gin Lane as you could imagine.

#140: Lefty's Brick Bar

The Bar

Lefty's Brick Bar. 1813 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78702

Visited 8/24/2019 @ 7pm.

The Drink

Treme Zombie. Haitian/Jamaican/Puerto Rican rums, falernum, passionola, herbsaint, lime. $10.

The zombie cocktail was spawned out of the famous tiki craze of the postwar years, being invented simultaneously with the Mai Tai and a good deal of other rum-based cocktails, though I am still a bit fuzzy on how exactly the Caribbean-derived liquor rum came to be associated with the general vibe of the Pacific South Seas. Besides Trader Vic's, Don the Beachcomber was the other major bar chain of that movement, and as it happens Donn Beach pioneered the use of one of the ingredients: passionola, AKA fassionola, is a passion fruit syrup that you'll be familiar with if you've ever had a hurricane, as it gives it that sweet taste and, in large does, that uniquely threatening bright red hue. This is perfectly appropriate because as it happens Lefty's is a New Orleans-themed bar (hence the name of the drink), and so in addition to including rums from several locations familiar to that major port city, some of the other ingredients are indigenous as well. Falernum is a syrupy rum-based Caribbean liqueur, and I wasn't very familiar with herbsaint before, but it's one of the many anise-derived liqueurs, first invented as an alternative to absinthe, and now the official variant is another product under the loving embrace of the Sazerac Company. The bartender was very excited about recommending this drink, and though any drink similar to a Hurricane is guaranteed to alarm my incipient hangover precognitive spider-sense, I did enjoy its sweet liquorice taste.

The Crew

Travis, Kathryn, Neil, Aaron.

Notes

The Arrive East Hotel is one of the newer major developments in this part of town. Happily for me, it has not one, not two, but three separate bars in it, which makes tackling multiple bars in one night extremely convenient. Lefty's is one of the two ground floor options, a New Orleans-themed joint that was highly touted for its Cajun/Asian fusion food, which I unfortunately did not sample but looked pretty awesome. There's a stone-walled interior part that opens onto an enclosed courtyard with seating and standing room. The garage doors by the entrance are a nod to the building's past, as a bike shop once operated here, and which was itself a repurposing of a 100 year-old warehouse. So there's lots of history that, as always, you the patron are perfectly welcome to ignore as you prowl around sipping your drink. I don't have a strong opinion on the conversion of the warehouse to a hotel (though I did read a cringeworthy interview with some of the principals where they refer to themselves as "hospitality disruptors"), but I can say that Lefty's was really nice. After we drank, it was up the stairs to the second stop of the night - a gin bar!

#139: La Holly

The Bar

La Holly. 2500 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78702

Visited 4/16/19 @ 9pm.

The Drink

Jamaica y Mezcal. Kimo Sabe mezcal, hibiscus syrup, triple sec, lime. $9.

One of the consistent benefits of doing the Sixth Street Complete project is that I get to learn new things all the time, but rarely have I had my mind blown as much as I did by my visit here. La Holly is a mezcal joint, so I gave my usual spiel in the expectation that I would get a mezcal drink. But while I was bantering with the bartender, who asked about my taste preferences in order to give me the drink that best showed off the bar, I said that I often enjoyed smokier mezcals similarly to how I often enjoyed peatier scotches once in a while. Importantly, I phrased it in a way that conveyed that I thought mezcal was a type of tequila in the same way as scotch is a type of whiskey.

Wrong! I couldn't have been more wrong. Upending everything I had ever thought or known, the bartender informed me that, actually, all tequilas are mezcals, but not all mezcals are tequilas. I might as well have been confusing squares and rectangles my whole life. Mind reeling amid the shattered fragments of my entire worldview, I accepted her suggestion of the Jamaica y mezcal a humbler but wiser man. I wasn't wise enough though: the drink was frozen, which as you know I normally dislike, and indeed it was almost the worst way possible to enjoy mezcal. The drink was indistinctly boozy and sweet thanks to the syrup and triple sec, reminding me of nothing so much as a New Orleans-style frozen daquiri with a toasted hibiscus flower on top. Evidently part of this was because Kimo Sabe mezcal is not one of your higher-end mezcals to begin with, which makes sense because you wouldn't put a high-end mezcal in a frozen drink at all. Much better was the mezcal Old-Fashioned I had as my second round, which you should get instead since it much more represents the bar. 

So please learn from my mezcal mistakes: mezcals are not a type of tequila, and never accept a frozen mezcal drink.

The Crew

Aaron, Elijah, Cat.

Notes

It's fortunate for Austin mezcal fans that La Holly is not only not the only mezcalería in Austin, it's not even the only mezcalería on Sixth Street. Unlike Mezcalería Tobalá just down the street, which perches above Whisler's at the head of the stairs out front, La Holly is housed at ground level in a charming little bungalow, and instead of a solemn, candlelit, sacramental air, La Holly is clean and modern and inviting. I had been to Taco Flats on Burnet Road a number of times and greatly enjoyed it, so I was pleasantly surprised to find out that La Holly is a project by the same owner, Simon Madera, who converted an older dive bar named Kellee's Place into its current form about two months before my visit. Not having been to the old place, I can't comment on how La Holly compares to its forebear in terms of gentrification quotient or any other measure, but on its own I have to say that La Holly is a very pleasant venue, much like Taco Flats. The bar is neat and clean, the seating area is wood-paneled and welcoming, and though mezcal is potent enough to where a prolonged drinking session would probably leave you writhing around on the floor, La Holly almost couldn't be better tailored to staying for a few rounds while you explore a few new varieties of mezcal.