Pub/Restaurant Crawl

I was invited last night to participate in a Pub/Restaurant Crawl.  This was really more of a Restaurant Crawl but there was drinking involved at each location.  My friend Randy put this together.  He along with his wife invited 4 others including me to join them.  We began our journey at Justine's at about 5:45.  This is a French Brasserie located on East 5th Street.  It is in deep East Austin.  The place was already getting full when we arrived and even though it was still a toasty 103 degrees, outdoor seating was the way to go.  Randy and I had decided it was going to be a beer night and the lady's had a Rosé wine.  We ordered a few items to split between us.  We first ordered mussels with frites.  I am not big on mussels but the frites were good.  We also ordered a cheese plate.  There were three different cheeses served with a fig spread.  Very tasty on the bread that it came with.  We followed this with an order of Steak Frites and steamed artichaut with a butter sauce.  All items were very good.  It was then time to move on.  

We began our 3 mile walk to Rainey Street.  We had been instructed that we needed to move over to Cesar Chavez for the walk for safety reasons.  This was a long hot walk but the good conversation made it go quickly.  We headed to Garage Mahal.  This place was packed.  It is all outdoor seating so while we waited for our table, we headed over to Icenhauer's to cool off and have a beer.  We received the call that our table was ready.  Back to the heat it was for us.  Here we all split an order of Tikka Masala, Saag and a couple of orders of Naan.  All of this was really delicious.  It was now getting late and was time to move on again.

We were now heading to the Mean Eyed Cat.  It was much later than we anticipated.  We now realized that we should have left Justene's after our first order of food.  We had spent too much time there.  The original plan was to stop at the Mean Eyed Cat for a drink and then move on to Hula Hut.  But, by the time we made it to the Mean Eyed Cat, it was already 10:30.  Most of us were exhausted.  Since some of our group had left cars at the Mean Eyed Cat and cabbed it to Justine's, they decided it was time to end the journey.  The remaining group which I was a part of went ahead and called the cab to head back to Randy's house and call it an evening.

I enjoyed the experience and would definitely do something like this again.  It probably would make sense to do this in cooler weather and not have such large distances in between the places.  I think 3 - 5 miles total would have to be the maximum.  Last nights schedule would have been a total of 7 miles if we would have continued on to Hula Hut.  By ending at the Mean Eyed Cat, this cut it down to 5 miles. We are already planning the next crawl and are thinking North to South this time.

Doing My Part to Keep Austin Weird!

Alan