#138: Suerte

The Bar

Suerte. 1800 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78702

Visited 12/30/18 @ 9pm.

The Drink

Don Dario. Reposado tequila, tamarindo, sarsaparilla, lime. $11.

The name of this drink is a homage to a well-known former occupant of this address, although I never had the good fortune to visit Don Dario, which still lives on at its new location down south at I-35 and Slaughter. Its namesake drink is kind of like a boozy root beer: a bit sweet, thanks to the sarsaparilla (which my brain insists on rendering as "sasparilla", for some reason), and tart, thanks to everything else. "Balance" is one of those subjective critic's terms that are as slippery to handle as your cutlery after you've had a few too many cocktails, but it fits here - both main flavors were distinct yet not overpowering, and when the bartender asked if I wanted another one when I finished it, I agreed immediately. I regret not coming here for happy hour (or "Lucky Hour" as they call it, a play on the restaurant's name, which means "luck"), since the drink would have been almost half-off, but sometimes it's tough to get down to Sixth Street before 5:30pm, when it ends. No matter, craft cocktails don't usually come cheap.

The Crew

Aaron.

Notes

By day, Suerte is a highly-acclaimed Mexican restaurant dedicated to raising the consciousness and expectations of Austinites about how good proper corn tortillas can be when crafted with care and artistry. By night, it still does that, but it's a bit more acceptable to also drink a lot of high-end cocktails along with your elevated repast. This place was hyped to the skies immediately upon its opening earlier in the year (the food, the vision, the decor, etc), and the buzz has not relented one bit - the joint was popping when I visited, and just like it was the other time that I went previously, which I alas was not able to incorporate into the Sixth Street Complete, it was still difficult to get a table. As with every well-publicized restaurant, there's concern that much of the clientele might be there just to Be Seen, which I don't appreciate, but I refuse to get into a debate on if there's a wrong way to visit a restaurant, so I'll demur. You should absolutely check this place out though - they genuinely do have some phenomenal corn tortillas, and though they're a bit pricey (you could probably do an interesting comparative socioeconomic study of Suerte vs Cisco's, the historic Mexican restaurant I had visited just prior), they occupy a perfectly legitimate niche in the Austin restaurant landscape and are worth visiting for that aspect alone. 

Plus, even the sports hecklers at Suerte are a classier breed - on my way out I ran into a guy who took one look at my Bills shirt and made a good-natured reference to The Comeback, a traumatic event in his Houston childhood, so we stood in their parking lot and talked about the Bills, the Oilers, Austin, our lives, and everything, for well after we each should have been going. It was one of those great serendipitous encounters with a friendly stranger, and as a bonus I got to introduce him to the Houston Oilers Fight Song, almost certainly the greatest fight song ever recorded.