2013 Austin City Guide: East Side Restaurants

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atxcityguide, Austin, East Austin, restaurants, reviews

While I don’t usually write review posts, this is my contribution to the 2013 AFBA City Guide. If you are heading to Austin this year or live here and want to find some new places to eat, please check it out!

A year and a half ago, I moved from San Antonio to the east side of Austin. I didn’t know much about this part of town, but it was a successful Craigslist match that led me here. Since then, I’ve grown to love the area. While the USDA labels parts of it as a food desert, there sure are a lot of good restaurants over here, minus the parking meters you find on the other side of the highway.

The (brick and mortar) restaurants in this guide are east of I-35, between Cesar Chavez and 51st Street. Most are located on 6th, 7th, 11th, and Manor, west of Airport.

Macaron Café in NYC

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bakery, French, macarons, NYC, reviews, travel

The weekend before last I headed down to the city from upstate NY to visit some grad school friends that I hadn’t seen in a few years, which was so great!  On Friday night after eating at a Greek place, we baked a batch of red velvet cupcakes and a loaf, then ate most of it while drinking wine and watching youtube videos.  Honey badger don’t care!

We went into Manhattan the next day where we walked around 5th Avenue (I finally went into the crazy Apple store), then meandered through Central Park.  At this point, I thought I’d try to look up the whereabouts of the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck via twitter, but it turned out that they had gone to Maine for a friend’s wedding.  Sad panda.

But then a lightbulb flashed, and I said I wanted to look for macarons!  Luckily I found out at that point that my friend Amanda was obsessed with them and had even had some at the famed Ladurée in Paris.  Jealous!

It turned out that we actually weren’t too far from a macaron-devoted bakery: Macaron Café!  Once there, we were greeted with the biggest selection of macarons I have seen yet.  This was actually only the second time I had really tried them at a bakery though, and there were only about five flavors the first time.  The shop was very small and cute with a little seating area in the back.  The menu also listed breakfast, salads, sandwiches, daily specials, and beverages, but we just bought macarons and left. 

Little Czech Bakery: Kolache Pit Stop in West, Texas

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bakery, Czech, Czech Stop, kolaches, Little Czech Bakery, reviews, Texas, travel

Guess what!  I’m going to be fancy and do a block quote.  What’s the occasion?  Kolaches!!  (aka Czech bun-type things filled with yumminess)

There’s apparently a big Czech/kolache center in Texas; sounds like I need to do some traveling for science (or vicarious traveling…maybe I can find a Texan-baker willing to do some research…? >.>).
– Mary from n00bcakes on kolaches

Howdy!  I am happy to report that this Texan-baker (1/4 Czech/Bohemian to boot!) has finally done some field research for blog pal Mary.  The Czech/kolache center that I assume she was referring to happened to be on the way to New York, but umm, much closer to San Antonio than my final destination.  It’s in West, Texas and every time I say this, I feel the need to add a dramatic pause where the comma is so as not to sound like I’m referring to West Texas.  Totally not where this place is…it’s 75 miles south of Dallas and 15 miles north of Waco, which is the northeast part of Texas.

This gem of a place is known as Little Czech Bakery which is part of Czech Stop.  There are gas pumps in front of it making it also a gas station, which you can use as justification for stopping to Czech it out (hur hur).   I had to get gas, so this was convenient, but there were so many people that I had to wait 5 minutes.  No biggie.