Austin is a world apart from Texas
WITH a Texas-size shiny, red boot kicking up its heel on the roof, Allens Boots was hard to miss. Inside were more than 10,000 pairs of cowboy boots, silver belt buckles ranging from merely shiny to massive statement and stack after stack of Stetson hats.
Not to be outdone, Lucy in Disguise with Diamonds, a few doors down on South Congress Avenue, was crowned with an outsize statue of its own: a 3.6-metre-tall zebra in full Carmen Miranda costume. Inside, clothing racks were packed with costumes and vintage clothes: Cleopatra to Care Bears and almost everything in between.
The Austin Motel, a couple of blocks down, looked like it had surfaced from a groovy time capsule with its billboard proclaiming itself “So Close and So Far Out”. Across the street, a busker gamely spun his drumsticks in front of a “Willie Nelson for President” mural.
We were in Austin’s SoCo neighbourhood – the heart of the capital city famously described by former governor Rick Perry as “the blueberry in the tomato soup” of Texas.
When my 15-year-old daughter, Sophie, and I arrived for my second visit to Austin, the locals assured us we weren’t exactly in the Lone Star state.
“I could never live in Texas,” tour guide and musician Jason Weems, said. “This is Austin.”
We spent four nights in Austin over my daughter’s winter break, inspired by little more than a sale fare and a sense that Austin was cool.
We spent the morning of our first full day in the city on Austin Detours’ two-hour “Real Austin” tour. The van tour, led by Weems, included stops at some of the capital city’s highlights. Our tour started in SoCo and headed north over the Colorado River on the Congress Avenue Bridge.
We saw Austin’s landmarks: its towering, sunset-red state Capitol building and the expansive University of Texas campus, including its clock tower, famous as a campus centre and infamous as the site of the first mass shooting of the modern era.
Our progress was marked by street art, from the “Hi: how are you?” frog mural near the university famously worn on a T-shirt by Kurt Cobain to the pretty, looping cursive “I love you so much” on the side of Jo’s Coffee in SoCo, originally written by a woman to her partner but widely seen as a love letter to the city itself.
Weems also introduced us to our first Austin food trailer, Gourdough’s, with its immensely satisfying – and just plain immense – doughnuts. Consumed: the “Flying Pig”, a salad plate-size pastry covered in maple glaze and topped off with a mound of bacon.
We tried the popular Odd Duck for our first dinner. The restaurant, which got its start in a trailer, focuses on pairing locally sourced ingredients in unexpected ways, including the salty, delicious pretzel pigface carnitas and a tasty redfish ceviche with sweet potato curry and grapefruit.
The next day we checked out three Austin retail legends, including Waterloo Records, an Austin legend at which customers can hear any of its massive collection of CDs and vinyl before purchase.
Next we marvelled at the 7,430-square-metre Whole Foods, now topped with an ice rink, just a few iterations from the humble natural food store that opened its doors in Austin in 1980. Finally, we made our way to Book People, the city’s largest independent bookstore, a place damn close to heaven on Earth for an avid reader.
We concluded our day at Fixe, a relatively new restaurant that aims to “celebrate the soul of the South”, which reminded me how excellent Southern cooking can be. The legendary biscuits are fluffy, buttery, served steaming with a heavenly pork spread. The restaurant also offers up a fantas- tically crispy fried chicken and multiple savoury variations of the Southern staple, grits.
Since we were celebrating the soul of the South, we made it a point to schedule a Texas barbecue stop. My pulled pork sandwich at La Barbecue – a food trailer in Cesar Chavez Park favoured by locals – was perfect, tangy barbecue balanced with a sharp chipotle coleslaw.
With temperate weather much of the year, a lot of life in Austin is lived outdoors. We made a short-lived attempt to follow suit, embarking on an afternoon bike tour that was cut short by rain.
“Lady Bird Lake is absolutely beautiful,” said John Mutchler, our guide from Rocket Electrics, which runs the company’s daily bike tours along the lake trail. We had an expansive view of the Austin skyline across the water, one Mutchler says is constantly changing given Austin’s exponential growth in the tech sector.
Like Weems, Mutchler is a working musician as well as a tour guide. “Music is what brought me,” he told us. Austin has about 250 live music venues, he said, ranging from Austin City Limits to clubs on Red River Street, north of the Colorado River.
Sophie, of course, was too young to get into most of the city’s clubs, but live music permeates the city – in coffee shops, on restaurant patios, street corners, in parks.
On our last night in Austin we ate at a place we still can’t get out of our heads – Uchi, the storied sushi restaurant that a decade ago catapulted Austin into a new class of food city. We tried biendo, a take on spring roll with shrimp tempura with slivers of grapes on top and “hot rocks” with Wagyu beef. Each dish was a micro work of art.
Early the next morning, New Year’s Eve, I wandered down to a still mostly empty SoCo for a last look and coffee at Jo’s before we packed up and headed to the airport.