Editorial
The best bars in Austin have always existed in tension with the city's growth. For every new rooftop bar targeting the tech transplant crowd, there is a bar on East 6th that has been doing the work without spectacle for a decade. The best bars in Austin right now are mostly the ones that ignored the boom and kept focused on what's in the glass. Here's where we send people who want to drink rather than perform drinking.
Austin's cocktail scene matured alongside its food culture — both arrived late by major-city standards, and both overcorrected toward seriousness in a way that produced some genuinely excellent results. The East Austin corridor now has more craft cocktail rooms per block than almost any comparable strip in America.
East Austin's live music scene runs along a different frequency to the 6th Street tourist corridor. The venues are smaller, the music is better, and the bars that host it have figured out that the combination of a good act and a well-made drink is more compelling than either alone.
Rainey Street has transformed from a quiet residential block into one of Austin's most concentrated bar destinations in less than a decade — a speed of change that has produced a mixed result. Some of the bars here are excellent. Several are tourist infrastructure. We have sorted them for you.
Austin is a city where the best drinking is being done by people who moved here specifically to drink well, in a city that was already interesting before they arrived. Half Step and Midnight Cowboy are the clearest evidence of that combination. East 6th as a whole is the most interesting drinking corridor in Texas. Our advice: ignore Rainey Street's recent additions and focus on what East Austin has built over the past decade.
James covers US bar scenes for barsforKings. He visits Austin twice a year and has been tracking the East 6th corridor's evolution since its earliest days. He has a particular interest in cities that get better faster than expected.
Five editor-curated guides, each ten bars, each tuned to a specific moment. The Austin bars our editors send first dates to, and the ones we send proposals to, and everything between.
Last reviewed April 30, 2026 by the barsforKings editorial team