#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.