#185: Pecan Square Cafe

The Bar

Pecan Square Cafe. 1200 B W 6th St, Austin, TX 78703

Visited 10/21/2022 @ 7:30pm.

The Drink

Blazin' Fury. Venezuelan rum, Jamaican rum, spiced pineapple cordial, pecan orgeat, habanero shrub, lime. $18.

I was complaining earlier in the Howards post that $18 for an espresso martini was on the high side for even high-end cocktails, so naturally the fates gifted me with another one mere hours later. This is essentially a hurricane, and like all hurricanes it's designed to have its rum foundation overlaid with a strong structure of sweetness. I thought this was a good hurricane, although I wish the bartender would have picked something else, as my last 2 drinks had also been on the sweet side and I was hoping for a changeup. It's not the drink's fault though; never blame a drink for the bar's mistake. I will say that one thing I didn't like about the drink was the glass it was served in; the large quantity of ice in it condensed and made it slippery enough to slide right out of my hand after I drank about half of it. Luckily they made me a new one, but not before half a hurricane was tragically lost. You might not experience the same issue, but as they say about hurricanes, sailor take warning!

The Crew

Aaron, Karen, Sienna, Mark, Elijah.

Notes

Pecan Square Cafe is not to be confused with the Old Pecan Street Cafe, a wedding venue adjacent to but not quite on Sixth Street. Pecan Street is of course the old name for Sixth Street itself before all the east-west tree streets were given numbers in 1886, but you can still see traces of the old name in things like the famous festival and restaurants like this. The 3rd MML establishment of the evening after Howards and Rosie's, I had previously visited this building when it was Cafe Josie. The new ownership has maintained the somewhat churchlike interior but given the layout an overhaul, most noticeably replacing the bar nook with an open kitchen layout, and adding an oddly large amount of paintings of arches on the walls, as in dozens of extremely similar paintings of arches. We were here to both drink and eat, as the restaurant is a pan-European fusion joint, and we were getting pretty hungry after several rounds of drinks. I had their marinated olives, which were fantastic, and their Neapolitan pizza, which was also really good; everyone else enjoyed their meals. 

MML has gotten a reputation as the cutting edge of restaurant gentrification, which is both somewhat undeserved (it's not like pricey restaurants have never existed in Austin before) and completely valid (while the old Ski Shores Cafe business model might not have been working too well, the new MML edition is unequivocally too rich for my blood). Since Pecan Street Cafe is replacing a restaurant that was broadly similar in its target audience and price point it's hard to complain too much about its current status, but if you have a bone to pick with one of the major players in the current Austin restaurant scene, keep that in mind. Besides, exactly what would you say is reasonable for a "pan-European fusion" restaurant in this city? Austin has transformed itself from a sleepy little college town to a major culinary center, and now we have the scene to match, no more and no less. For myself, I'm just here to drink.