#210: The Kitchen

The Bar

The Kitchen. 400 W 6th St, Austin, TX 78701

Visited 4/11/2025 @ 7pm.

The Drink

Hibiscus margarita. El Afan Blanco, Grand Marnier, fermented honey, hibiscus, lime. $20.50.

The Kitchen is one of those places that gives you a cocktail menu in the form of a little book, and the recommendation came from their page of house specialties, although they had another page of gin cocktails which also looked intriguing. The tequila here is Blanco from El Afán ("desire, yearning"), a Jalisco-based distiller. It has a fairly balanced profile, Hibiscus is a solid choice as a margarita base, not only for its complex floral/tart tangy flavor but also to the red color it gives to the drink. Grand Marnier is of course the cointreau/triple sec-adjacent component that adds a little sweetness. I wanted to know more about the fermented honey (AKA mead), like if it was from Meridian Hive meadery or somewhere else local, but the bartender unfortunately didn't have the opportunity to fill me in on the backstory due to the needs of the other patrons (see below). Overall it was a solid hibiscus margarita, although not exactly a great value for the price.

The Crew

Aaron.

Notes

The first thing about this restaurant you will learn is that it is owned by Kimbal Musk, brother of Elon, being the fourth outpost of his restaurant chain. Normally that would merely be a Fun Austin Fact along the lines of Sandra Bullock owning Walton's Fancy & Staple down the street, but this place seems to be a sort of "company bar" for the entire extended corporate Muskoverse, as sitting near me were employees of Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring Company, etc., having exactly the kinds of discussions you'd expect while ordering drinks at a rapid pace. The interior is like a diner but nicer, if that makes sense, with a vibe in between "homey" and "high-end". I looked it up and it was designed by Michael Hsu, an architect who has also designed an impressive number of "hey, that's neat" buildings around town and elsewhere. Austin has a cool legacy of artists quietly leaving their their unique marks all around town for those who know where to look, like Gary Martin's signs, or Evan Voyle's neon lighting, so it's neat that that tradition is still going strong even if The Kitchen isn't exactly the same kind of local business as those others. 

The building it occupies on the ground floor, the imaginatively named Sixth and Guadalupe tower, is currently Austin's tallest tower, at least until the Waterline seizes that crown not just for Austin but for all of Texas, and it has a pretty interesting backstory: it replaced a series of hotels, including the Alamo Hotel, which was owned by LBJ's brother and featured in the music videos for Rock the Casbah and Pancho and Lefty. This tower was commissioned by Facebook in 2019 just before the pandemic, when commercial real estate in downtown Austin looked like a can't-miss investment for all the in-person jobs that were surely coming down the pike. Well, things didn't exactly turn out that way, and so Facebook has decided not to move in at all, opting instead to sublease out the whole thing. Those of us who remember the Intel Shell should be relieved that that debacle was not repeated here, and instead of a decaying ruin there is a restaurant, its proprietor's politics aside.