double shifts

6 Austin coffee-and-cocktail hot spots where drinks flow from day to night

Bars splitting time between coffee and cocktails, like this one at the Carpenter Hotel, are central to Austin's unpretentious daytime and nighttime appeal.

Photo by Jessica Attie

Coffee, beer, and cocktails have been needlessly separate experiences for far too long. Thankfully, you can never really accuse Austinites of being prudes or traditionalists. This city is all about sitting outside for hours, mixing work and pleasure, and browsing long, eclectic menus.

These six neighborhood cafe-bar hybrids are staples in their communities for their breadth of offerings and commitment to the real deal. Open early, closing late, and hosting community events, they are home away from home for lots of locals and are quickly becoming one of Austin’s best identifying features. The great news is no one needs a fancy excuse to enjoy them, day or night.

Better Half
This downtown bar boasts a wide variety of dishes, from vermicelli to pastrami to grilled halloumi. The Fourth Street location makes it easy to pop over in between errands or a walk from Zilker, and the long bar and booths make it easy to squeeze tons of friends together. The adventurous coffee menu includes flavors like cardamom, lavender, and lemon, while the Chagaccino showcases “wild foraged chaga mocha” sweetened with monk fruit. Here, unsurprisingly, the cocktails have an adventurous worldly slant, augmented by a healthy beer list (with at least one non-alcoholic option), and a long list of wines by the bottle. This low-key but chic gathering place is the epitome of Austin's wonderfully indecisive grab-any-drink-and-chat culture.

The Buzz Mill
This 24/7 Riverside community staple is as unpretentious as it gets. The log cabin could take you from one dawn to the next if you had the stamina, with coffee, beer, and spirits; vegan-friendly food trucks; and a rotating schedule of entertainment. Behind the bar, jugs of house-infused liquors line up, including blackberry apple gin, smoked peach whiskey, and … bear mace vodka. Let us know what that is, if you’re brave enough to try it. In case you do ever leave the premises, the Buzz Mill and Camp Master Chris Hyde prepare Lumber Society members with woodsy survival skills. The Seventh Street outpost has more limited — but still extensive — hours and offers plant-based brunch favorites from early morning well into the night.

Carpenter Coffee Bar
Another counter that changes jobs for the night shift, the coffee bar at the Carpenter Hotel feels a bit like a speakeasy, tucked away in a city library-like brick building just south of the river. The open, industrial interior looks like a community room converted into an artist’s collective loft, with vaguely mismatched leather chairs facing each other in little pockets and a wall of vinyls to browse and play. It serves coffee and pastries during the day (including some unique cafe offerings with opaque names like Ladybird and Ponyboy, along with the universal coffee standards). At night, it switches over to cocktails, wine, and a couple of beers, plus a gourmet snack menu. Stay for the transition and hit the pool in between.

Cosmic Coffee
Cosmic Coffee + Beer Garden is practically a botanical garden. A central pond houses edible plants, frogs, fish, and more occasional visitors, and is self-sustaining with a tiny amount of help from an electrical pump powering a decorative waterfall. The bar’s efforts in maintaining this space, plus raised garden beds and a chicken coop, have earned the property its National Wildlife Habitat Certification. Food trucks on the lot use some of the edible plants harvested there, fertilized by waste composted onsite. Inside, the creative coffee and alcohol offerings overlap in “boozy” coffees: the Nitro Espresso Cocktail featuring Deep Eddy vodka, and a Rum Thai Iced Coffee, among others.

Opa
If it’s possible to be 100 percent Austin and 100 percent Mediterranean all at once, Opa does it. The busy little house on South Lamar is full of homey furniture, coffee table books, and board games. It would almost be overstimulating if it weren’t so darn cozy. The mostly meat-free menu is great for sharing, from unassuming but lovely thin-crust pizza to sampler plates featuring traditional Greek dishes like hummus and dolmas. This cafe offers some cocktails, but mostly focuses on wine, with bottles lined up at the end of the bar for perusing. There’s live music inside and outside on one of Austin’s most beautiful oak-shaded patios, and regular open mic nights. All this on a busy street means Opa can’t be beat for meetings, dates, or spontaneous solo unwinds.

Turnstile
Turnstile doesn’t do anything halfway, except its daily schedule. Instead of splitting attention between coffee and cocktails, this North Austin food park “transitions” from morning roasts to evening brews. It emphasizes quality, with locally roasted fair trade coffees, a “highly curated” roster of draft beers, and occasional craft cocktails. Equally over-the-top are the grass-fed burgers, piled high with sauces and veggies. Austin FC fans are a big part of the clientele, heading over from the Q2 Stadium half a mile away, but Turnstile stays connected to the broader community with Tuesday trivia nights, a weekly sustainable community market, and frequent donation drive collaborations.

burgers charity drinks craft-beer coffee cocktails brunch lunch

Belles of the Ballroom

9 Austin bar and venue experts take over popular Old Austin space near UT

29th Street Ballroom/Facebook

Changes are coming at the 29th Street Ballroom, but the goal is to preserve what already makes it special.

The evolution continues at the 29th Street Ballroom, the music venue formerly attached to Spider House Café. It's no secret, Resound Presents CEO and co-founder Graham Williams says, that he and a large team of other industry pros are taking over the space; but now they're ready to talk about what comes next for the venue and adjoining bar.

Although Spider House Café closed in 2020, the Ballroom stayed open, and has continued serving University of Texas students and anyone else who wants to see a show outside of the ordinary: punk shows, burlesque revues, fundraisers, and more. It'll stay open through most of the renovations, scheduled through January of 2025, and is expected to hold a grand opening in March.

Now Resound — one of Austin's top live music organizers, which was itself born from the ashes of another Austin institution — is lending two of its co-founders to managing the space going forward: Williams and Ian Orth. They're joining seven other team members from venues around town, many of them overlapping: Amy Mullins, Brian Tweedy, Jason McNeely, John Yaklin, and Shannon LeBoeuf of Hotel Vegas, Chess Club, Kinda Tropical, Tweedy’s, and Yellow Jacket Social Club, in varying capacities; and Brian Buscemi and Mike Sanchez of the Little Darlin’.

Williams emphasizes that although things will be changing at the Ballroom, the goal isn't to change anything people already love.

"Over the next few months as we kind of ease into the spring, we're using this downtime to revitalize things, decorate, revamp some of the stuff in the venue and the bar, and just kind of get things moving in the right direction," Williams says, "taking what's already popular about the venue and just adding to it, really."

Bar updates
The biggest shift will be turning the bar from an accessory to live shows into its own entity that's open even when there's nothing else going on. Amy Mullins, best known as a co-owner of Yellow Jacket Social Club, is overseeing that transition. She's never operated a venue that is primarily focused on music, and has been enjoying learning more about how to do it; she even worked the door recently when a staff member called out sick.

Mullins echoes Williams in assuring that the change is more about logistics than tone. It'll still feel like Old Austin, but she does express a hope to run more than the "typical venue bar," handing out simple drinks as quickly as possible. She's working on a new menu that includes wine, beer, craft cocktails, and non-alcoholic options like tea, kombucha, or mocktails. Regardless of what's on the schedule on any given night, Mullins says the menu will stay the same.

"There's no drink too complicated for us to make, however busy we are," she says.

Food options
Another goal for the team will be making sure the space works when there's not someone onstage to crowd around. They'll expand the front and side patios and create a food truck food court that features the same trucks that are there now, plus one newcomer. All in all, that includes Yalla Burger & Wings, Gyro Center, Li’l Nonna’s Vegan Pizzeria, Guppy’s Indian Fried Chicken, Waylon J’s BBQ, and Ay Chihuahua Tacos.

The expanded patio will connect to Tweedy's Bar next door, which also has its own food trucks. The idea is to create a space to hang out after shows that feels fit for the purpose. It's possible to stick around after events now, but the layout does create a vague feeling of loitering.

Artist and fan-friendly tweaks
On the entertainment side, Williams says some of the renovations include putting in a new sound system, redoing the green room, updating the facade, and repainting signs. Since the winter is a slower time for live music, they'll be taking advantage of the extra time to work on things before packing the calendar with more events than before. Resound will handle most of the bookings in live music, comedy, and DJ sets, welcoming both national and local talent.

Whatever the details end up being, this team has proved to Austinites that they know how to run venues worth visiting. And since they're all friends and business partners on multiple levels, it sounds like having this many cooks in the kitchen just isn't an issue.

"Some of us have been roommates and known each other since we were young," says Williams. "It's a good mix of people who are all very like minded, so a lot is being brought to the table per decision. So yeah, it's it's really exciting. Sometimes that's not the case. .... But with this project, it's a lot of really great, creative people that are good at what they do [and] they trust each other."

bars live music concerts comedy