#230: Campo

The Bar

Campo. 1630 E 6th St #100, Austin, TX 78702

Visited 4/10/2026 @ 5:30pm.

The Drink

Spicy watermelon mint margarita. Carabuena tequila, watermelon, mint, chili. $16 ($10 during happy hour).

I've had watermelon margaritas before, but this one was easily the most citrullic yet, as it included a chunk of actual watermelon in it, thus putting the false promises of the other, lesser renditions of this humble classic that I've been drinking all these years into sudden stark relief. What a fool I'd been! An additional element in favor of this rendition is that the Carabuena tequila it uses is from Austin. I'd first encountered Carabuena when doing my research after visiting Willow Country down on West Sixth; after finally trying it, I think it makes an excellent base for the cocktail. I snagged this really fresh-tasting drink at the $10 happy hour price and it was a fantastic bargain.

Mezcalita maracuya. 400 Conejos mezcal, passionfruit, orange, agave, chili. $0.

This was the drink that second-best represented the bar, as I put it when I requested a second round. Campo does a lot of in-house juicing and making of agua frescas, and so I got another really fresh and flavorful cocktail. A mezcalita is just a margarita with mezcal in it, and maracuya is Spanish for passionfruit, so this drink is very true to its name. Speaking of, the name of the mezcal, which over-literally translates to "400 rabbits" (hence the name of the Alamo Drafthouse's specialty bar down south), is actually a translation of "centzon totochtin", the Aztec term for being really drunk: think of "drunk as 400 rabbits" as saying "3 sheets to the wind" in Nahuatl. By a funny numerical coincidence, the French also have a "400" phrase: "faire les quatre cents coups" figuratively means "to raise hell, to live a wild life", but when François Truffaut used it as the (perfectly apt) title for his debut film, it was bafflingly calqued by the studio as "The 400 Blows", which doesn't mean anything at all in English. What gives? What were they thinking?

In conclusion, I liked this cocktail as well. If the third beer is the philosopher's beer, the second must be the linguist's.

The Crew

Aaron.

Notes

About a month ago Campo ("countryside, field" in Spanish) moved into the empty space left by Recreation's closure a few months back. None of the staff were quite sure what had happened to Recreation, but from what I can piece together, it seems like when Recreation's sister restaurant Ma'Coco's lease ran out on Comal a few blocks away, the owners tried to consolidate the concepts at Recreation, and just couldn't make it work out. RIP. Instead of Recreation's San Diego cuisine specialization, Campo's an upscale interior Mexican sort of place. The nice clean decor reinforces this impression; you can't really tell from the photo above, but everything is very neat and Instagrammable, which my bartender and I spent some time discussing. As I keep saying, it's really tough to open a cheap dive on Sixth Street these days, so the economics of influencer-friendly establishments, both in looks and menus, get more and more attractive to prospective bar owners who are trying to battle any number of economic headwinds these days. 

As always, this is unfortunate for those of us who are attempting to recapture our lost memories of $1 Lone Stars and $3 wells, but what are you going to do. Interestingly, restaurant meals have gotten nearly 50% more expensive since 2017 versus only a 33% increase for drinks at a bar, so rather than complaining about how bougie cocktails have gotten, we should be directing our ire at more upscale menus and mourning cheap wing specials instead. But it's missing the point to spend too much time grumbling at how much appetizers are these days, and you won't hear (too much) grumbling from me on that point - bars aren't charities, and the worst bar of all is the one with the CLOSED sign on it. Instead I will say that you should go here if you're looking for a slightly more casual, less dressed-up companion to Mexta at Sixth and Congress.