#154: The Lucky Duck

The Bar

The Lucky Duck. 1300 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78702

Visited 3/7/2020 @ 7:30pm.

The Drink

Mezcal Old-Fashioned. Ilegal Joven mezcal, agave, Angostura bitters. $11.

For a drink whose name literally translates to "out of date", the number of variants on an Old-Fashioned I've encountered is truly amazing; as I keep saying, it's far and away the most-recommended drink I receive. But there are still plenty of surprises to be found in such an antique framework, including what's even in this variant. I am still not sure exactly what the mezcal was; I was told that it contained "El Silencio Ilegal", but since that's impossible (those are two completely different brands), I think that it's most likely it's Ilegal Joven, since they list Ilegal on their drink menu in their watermelon punch, and it's most likely to be the Joven variety specifically since it's unaged and therefore cheaper. Using a rawer and less polished liquor in a cocktail isn't a crime if you know what you're getting into, and the bartender did tell me that this was sort of a second choice since she had run out of an ingredient for the drink she really wanted to make me, so all's well - the drink would have been better with a nicer mezcal, but that's true of every drink, and the agave helped to take the edge off of the youthful roughness of the mezcal quite nicely.

The Crew

Kathryn, Neil, Aaron, James (not pictured), Geoff (not pictured), Karen (not pictured).

Notes

The Lucky Duck replaced Attabar, to my regret (which in turn replaced Sputnik, to my even greater regret), but the latest bar in this spot is a good general everyman bar, with enough cheap drinks to lure casuals and enough high-end but not TOO high-end cocktails to satisfy people who want those instead. The vibe is friendly, with the same solid dance-friendly but not dance-mandatory floor, and the outdoor patio is still spacious and welcoming. There's now a machine where you can acquire cute little rubber duckies to play around with, which turns out to be irresistible fun even to people in their 30s. It was my last official stop for the night, but we actually ended up coming back here many hours later after we had a long bar crawl to celebrate James's birthday the day prior, so clearly The Lucky Duck was good enough to make a solid immediate impression on all of us as both a good intermediate stop and as a later stop. It's always a little puzzling to me when a location can boast multiple bars that are all individually excellent but end up always going under, but there's a lot to a bar beyond just having strong pours that you as a patron don't see; a bar can look very different on the other side of the register! Here's hoping The Lucky Duck lasts a little while longer, because there's no such thing as having too many solid all-purpose bars.