#217: Grá Mór

The Bar

Grá Mór. 204 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78701

Visited 9/26/2025 @ 7:30pm.

The Drink

Matcha Point. Ketel One vodka, lychee, matcha, cacao, oat milk. $14.

Every once in a while I have a real conundrum about which drink to document as the "official" drink of the visit. Generally this is a good problem to have, because it means that there were multiple good options, and that's exactly what happened here: as I was waiting for my friends to show up, I gave my "what's the drink that best represents the bar?" spiel to the cashier/bartender, and I asked her to select "the second-best option" as my waiting drink in order to save the paragon for the blog. She chose the Summer Bounty, a blueberry white wine spritzer which was so good that I ordered another a few rounds later (though I unfortunately did not manage to get a picture). But her actual selection was the Matcha Point, which was great too. Its name is obviously a pun on the tennis term, not the middling Scarlett Johansson movie, and it is basically exactly what you would expect a cocktail from a café to be like: smooth, refreshing, slightly sweet but not cloying. I really liked both of these drinks, but the Matcha Point is slightly more worth it in terms of booze per buck. Then again, if you're drinking to get drunk, you're better off just going next door (more on that below).

Summer Bounty. White wine, blueberry, apricot, black tea, club soda. $14. 

As mentioned above, this was great, a bright red-hued elixir despite its main ingredient being blueberry. If only Sixth Street had sidewalk space for outdoor café seating, you could easily drink a million of these on a hypothetical patio, like a more upscale mimosa. 

The Crew

Ishani, Aaron, Elijah, Nick.

Notes

"Grá Mór" is a brand new side project of the roughly year-old bar The Dead Rabbit next door which they opened within the last 2 weeks in order to draw some of the morning café traffic to the space. Its name is Irish for "big love" (not in the same sense as the HBO show, though). It's an extremely cute venue, in the kawaii sense of the term: cute art on the walls, cute knickknacks on most flat surfaces, and cute paper love notes that you can write yourself and affix anywhere (even their website lets you scribble similarly). They didn't use this term, but its relationship to its parent bar next door reminded me of a brighter, cleaner, more modern version of a snug, the traditionally women-specific smaller bars appended to the main pubs you find in Ireland. Many of our drinks even came from the main bar, like our round of Guinnesses. Unlike a snug, this is definitely more targeted at the coffee crowd, as it closes at 9pm, which is definitely too early for a bar, although opening at 8am seems a tad late for how early people want their coffee. It wasn't too crowded when we were there, though we were on the late end of their hours. Luckily, the Dead Rabbit is great, so as it was getting to be closing time after our several rounds, we just popped next door for some more pints.