The Bar
Visited 5/23/2025 @ 6pm.
The Drink
Watermelon margarita. Well tequila, watermelon mixer, fresh lime juice. $14.
Kind of a funny thing to recommend as the drink that best represents the bar, but I enjoyed it, especially on the patio given
how freaking hot it's been recently. When I asked the bartender if there was anything special about it, he bluntly told me no, other than that it was made with fresh lime juice. Well, it was fine - 7 oz of sweet watermelon refreshment (watermelon is a
criminally underrated margarita flavor). The only thing unusual about it was the price: he told me it was $14, which it was, but the receipt broke that down to $12 + a 20% automatic gratuity. I haven't encountered that odd pricing structure at other bars, and while it doesn't make a difference to the consumer, I wonder what that does to tip revenue, especially in this era of
tip backlash and
tax shenanigans.
The Crew
Notes
This is the latest example of a bar rebranding without changing ownership. The Gold Fox Hospitality parent company that owned the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Icehouse here on West Sixth
recently purchased old Easy Tiger location on East Seventh (sadly the original Easy Tiger location on Dirty Sixth remains unused) and reopened it as WTF Sporting Club (I'm sure a
certain media company would have frowned at a "Fox Sporting Club"). A few months later they additionally rebranded this establishment as Space Fox in order to lean into the fox theme, so there's a lot more fox stuff decorating the interior after the rebrand to make the mascot even more prominent than it already was. They have reconfigured the venue in a number of ways, most notably reducing the size of the patio I liked so much, but in business model terms the biggest change might be the shift from being a live music venue to playing EDM.
West Sixth is a bit removed from both the typical college student/drunk tourist demographic and the
recent dramatic mobility changes on Dirty Sixth, but even though the clientele west of Congress has a bit more money to spend and so the bars lean towards the higher end, the same economic forces still apply: a DJ is much cheaper for the venue than a live band, which requires
many more drinks to be sold in order to break even. Austin's much-mocked "Live Music Capital of the World" slogan is
continually under debate, but the pandemic marked an inflection point where both local affordability trends and
nationally shifting musical tastes make a guy with a laptop an increasingly tempting option for venues over the numberless hassles associated with the logistics of being a live music venue. But I guess there's always the Continental Club, and when I visited I was literally the only patron, so my bartender and I had this discussion while he blasted hair metal, completely
wub-free.
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