Austin Restaurant Weeks spur special multi-course menus across town

Austin's restaurant scene will have an influx of multi-course meals during Austin Restaurant Weeks, a citywide promotion happening from August 28 to September 13.

Austin Restaurant Weeks is a local effort that follows a national format: participating restaurants set multi-course menus with a shared pricing structure, offering a bit of a discount compared to ordering à la carte and generating a donation for local food related charities.

In Austin, the pricing structure is $25 for brunch or lunch, and $50 or $75 for dinner. Although the prices are fixed, each restaurant has some freedom to decide how much food that amount will buy, so some lunches have two or three courses and some dinners have three or four. Some businesses — restaurants as well as food vendors that don't have a typical restaurant set-up — are offering other specials.

The local beneficiary is the Central Texas Food Bank (CTFB), which will receive $4-10 from each meal. According to the Austin Restaurant Weeks website, a dinner for two people can lead to 60 meals through the food bank.

This year, there are more than 100 participating restaurants. Instead of listing each one (which can be viewed online), here are five recommendations with light menu descriptions:

• Ēma: Ēma, sister restaurant to the very popular Aba, opened in January of 2026, making this its Restaurant Weeks debut. The $25 lunch menu includes three choices for each of the first two courses: one of three hummus flavors, followed by grilled chicken kebab, a chicken Caesar wrap, or Brussels sprouts with honey crisp apple. For an optional third course (add $2), there's frozen Greek yogurt.
• Jupiter Supper Club: This four-course dinner for $75 has both meat and plant-based options. Jupiter Supper Club invited CultureMap in this summer to try the new happy hour, and we were impressed by its plant-focused prowess that goes far beyond standard vegan options. The menu includes a fennel salad and sunflower tortellini for everyone, a choice between a salt roasted celery root galette and a New York steak, and cheesecake (that can be made vegan by request). There's also one included cocktail pairing, with Tito’s Handmade Vodka, Italicus, peach and rose tea, St. Germain, lemon, and matcha vanilla syrup.
• Lucky Robot: Nothing's set in stone, but according to a Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation filing, Lucky Robot may be leaving its longtime South Congress space. In the interest of never taking things for granted, we recommend taking this as an excuse to stop by. The sushi restaurant will be serving up a $75 dinner starting with a choice of ocean trout or Brussels sprouts, then a choice of barbacoa dumplings or spinach and shiitake dumplings, then a five-piece nirigi course curated by the chef, and finished with either steak or crispy tofu. A $10 mocktail add-on combines blueberry, yuzu, and basil.
• Summer House on Music Lane: Besides being one of the most pleasant dining spaces tucked off South Congress, this boutique hotel restaurant has both lunch and dinner offerings, so your plans can be flexible. For lunch, the restaurant will serve watermelon salad with feta and pomegranate molasses, salmon avocado toast, and a seasonal assortment of donut holes; for dinner, there's a spring pea dip with crackers, veggie fritters, and a blackened redfish couvillon (Cajun stew).
• Verbena Food & Drink: Verbena has one of the most versatile menus of all, with tons of choices. Whether it's the two-course lunch or four-course dinner option ($75), Verbena’s prix fixe menus can also accommodate vegetarians and meat eaters. Two dishes are on both menus: guests will choose between a tostada de atún (tuna) topped with avocado crema, pickled shallot, and garlic chips; or a Texas peach panzanella with burrata, heirloom tomato, and sourdough croutons, drizzled with a peach vinaigrette. Other highlights include a smashburger (lunch), pollo adobado (dinner), and "carne asada" mushrooms (dinner).