#231: Jo's Coffee

The Bar

Jo's Coffee. 221 W 6th St, Austin, TX 78701

Visited 4/24/2026 @ 11:30am.

The Drink

Four Corners El Chingón. $6.

There's a funny beer selection here, as despite Jo's being a proudly Austin chain, basically every beer they had was from Four Corners, an equally proudly Dallas brewery. When I posed my standard question about the drink that best represents the bar, the staff collectively vacillated between this and the Local Buzz, their honey blonde, before eventually choosing the IPA. I was glad they did, as El Chingón (a cheerfully affectionate vulgar Spanish term meaning something like "the badass") is an excellent IPA, one of the few which can rival my beloved 512 IPA in terms of smoothness (72 IBU vs 512's 60) and quiet strength (at 7.3% ABV, it actually bests 512's 7.0%). I wasn't trying to get hammered in a bank lobby at 11:30am, but if I had been, this would have been a really pleasant way to do it, as there was some very nice seating with a good street view right behind the Jo's counter that I had all to myself. $6 a can isn't a particularly great bargain, but again: this is in a bank lobby.

The Crew

Aaron.

Notes

Jo's is a local mini-chain of coffee shops with an interesting position in the Austin cultural landscape. The flagship location on South Congress is internationally known for its iconic "I love you so much" wall mural, beloved of locals and tourists alike, but over the years the mural has become so well-known that it has reached escape velocity and is now more famous than the coffee shop itself, which is kind of like if everyone only knew the NYC restaurant featured in When Harry Met Sally as the "I'll have what she's having" deli. Still, there are obviously worse problems for your business to have than featuring world-renowned iconography on your building (at the very least, you can sell the crowds of people standing in line to take selfies in front of the mural coffee to drink while they wait), and the chain has done fairly well for itself since its founding in 2010. In fact, it has recently expanded beyond Austin to double-digit locations in multiple states thanks to its current status as a recently acquired member of the Hyatt hotel empire. 

Now, it's always potentially dangerous when a much-loved scrappy local joint scales up and out quickly - Alamo Drafthouse, Kerbey Lane, Torchy's, and Vert's are only some of the Austin-specific cautionary examples I could cite - but I feel like the coffee shop business model, particularly of the grab-and-go variety, has fewer inherent scaling problems than a restaurant, being more dependent on the location for its ambience. This Jo's outpost is located in the lobby of the freshly remodeled Chase Bank Tower, which was recently officially renamed to the Procore Tower but in a Sears Tower-like fit of stubbornness will probably retain its older name forever, especially among those old enough to remember when it was gold, like me. I had to go here during lunchtime since they close up at 5pm, which isn't great from an alcohol sales perspective but is just fine for a coffee shop that is focused on its core competency. Amusingly, the Jo's location nearest my house at Manchaca/Stassney can't sell alcohol at all since it is just barely within the TABC-mandated 300 foot radius of Crockett High School, but that just goes to show that booze isn't necessarily a big part of the Jo's business model, which is fair enough.

#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. $16.

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, both tariffs on the national level as well as the related falling alcohol sales on the local level. 

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.