Saturday, August 31, 2019

#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.

Saturday, August 24, 2019

#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!