Best part of waking up

Popular South Austin bar and kitchen debuts new brunch in exclusive sneak peek

Aviary Wine & Kitchen has adapted their dinner grain salad for their new Sunday brunch.

Most of the time going out for a South Austin brunch means one thing — a giant plate of breakfast tacos, chilaquiles, or migas to magically undo the damage from the night before. Still, while we would never malign the restorative powers of eggs, cheese, and tortillas, sometimes we don’t want to spend Sunday Funday clawing our way out of a food coma.

But before now, we either had to make our way north or scramble to turn a Kind bar and leftover pad thai into a suitable breakfast. Now you can have your eggs and eat them too at Aviary Wine & Kitchen’s new brunch beginning Sunday, December 10.

In October, owners Marco Fiorello and partner and culinary director John Coronado transformed the South Lamar space from a quirky home furnishings store to a neighborhood restaurant, but have thus far been focusing on happy hour and dinner. Now the pair are hoping to become a morning destination for the growing neighborhood.

The restaurant gave CultureMap an exclusive sneak peek at what chef de cuisine Thomas Calhoun and beverage director Alex Wheatly Bell have in store. Although there are plenty of options to satisfy big eaters, even the heaviest dishes have a brightness that sets them apart from the expected. If you have to prepare yourself to battle the holiday hordes, start with a dozen oysters from the raw bar and order the wheat berry and couscous salad with harissa yogurt, cucumber, and winter vegetables. Or opt for the house salad with seasonal greens, tossed with radish, capers, blanched veggies, feta, pine nuts, bread crumbs, and a red wine vinaigrette, and all topped with a soft boiled egg.

Heartier appetites will undoubtedly appreciate the Breakfast Sammich (scrambled eggs drenched in a green chili mornay sauce on a house English muffin), steak and egg (a grilled butcher cut and fried egg with a tangy romesco and an herb salad), or the lamb burger with arugula, fried egg, and a dollop of an aioli flavored with schug — an herbal garlic pepper sauce that is a staple of Yemenite Jewish cuisine.

On the sweeter side, Aviary will be offering one of Austin’s more intriguing French toasts with a brioche base slathered in a velvety chicken liver mousse instead of butter, and drenched in an ever-changing selection of fruit syrups. The offal averse can opt for the daily pastries, available by item or in half-dozen and dozen baskets. Both the brioche and pastries are made with grains from the locally-owned =(and local chefs' favorite) Barton Springs Mill.

And of course, brunch would just be late breakfast without the addition of a little booze. Aviary will offer bottle-service Cava mimosas (we are guessing they’ll skip the nightclub-style flares), Montucky Cold Snack micheladas, and a spritz made from Cappelletti (a wine based aperitif that is sort of a sweeter cousin to Campari) and heritage apple cider from Shacksbury.

Brunch will be offered on Sundays between 11 am and 3 pm.

brunch

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