Hi friends, it is Labor Day weekend, and the bats picked a good year to be the main event: Bat Fest turns twenty on Saturday. Alongside it, a Vietnamese kitchen up on West Anderson and a new music room opening in St. Elmo. There is also something new further down. Two of the people who make things in this city answered my questions, and their answers are better than anything I would have written about them.
Three things, as always. One place to eat, one thing to do, and one thing to know. Here is your weekend.
Eat, this week
North Shoal Creek · lunch and dinner · vegan and vegetarian options
Vietnamese has not had a turn in this slot all run, which is a real gap in a city with this much of it. Anh Em Vietnamese Kitchen sits in a strip on West Anderson Lane, and the menu is the useful kind: pho, banh mi, vermicelli bowls, and matcha soft serve to finish. It is casual, it has table service, most of the menu has a vegan or vegetarian version, and unlike almost anywhere central you will park without circling the block. The owners identify as Asian-owned and women-owned on their own listing. It is a hot week, and this is a menu built for one.
Do, this weekend
Congress Avenue bridge · Saturday, September 5 · $15 in advance, $25 at the gate
Bat Fest turns twenty this year, which is long enough that it has stopped being a novelty and become a tradition. Three stages on the Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue bridge from 3 until 11, with Sheck Wes, Wild Child, and Ben Kweller on the bill, food and craft vendors down the deck, and underneath all of it the reason anyone comes at all: roughly 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats heading out for the night between 7 and 8:45.
Buy ahead. It is $15 in advance against $25 at the gate, children 10 and under are free with an adult, and the emergence does not wait for anyone still standing in the ticket line.
Know, this week
Here is the one nobody has been inside yet. Still Austin Whiskey Co. is opening the Still Austin Quarter in St. Elmo, 15,000 square feet split into four rooms: an atrium you walk into, a Vinyl Lounge with a DJ every night, a private event space, and a music room built around a stage designed by the acoustician Steven Durr. Around 500 people across the whole thing, 125 of those seats outdoors, with local and national acts booked Thursday through Saturday.
The date is the part they have not said. Their own site says September 2026 and nothing more precise, so treat this as a watch-this-month item rather than a make-a-plan one. In a city that has spent several years losing rooms this size, one opening at all is the news.
Awesome Austinites
Two people who make something here, in their own words.
Courtesy of Savir Foods, LLC
Josue Rivas, Savir Foods. He came to Austin for a job at Dell and stayed to build Savir Foods, which is his own surname spelled backwards. He made his first hot sauce for his niece, decided it ran too hot for her, and went back to the kitchen for a milder one. That sauce, Jala Pepa, took the number two slot on Hot Ones the following spring, and Savir has been back on the show twice since. He started out making 48 bottles a month.
Asked what he would tell someone who moved here last week, he ended on this: “Austin can feel small once you get involved, but you must show up consistently for the city to open to you.”
Credit: Tim Hardiman
The Animeros. Mauro Lopez, Nicolas Sánchez, and Nick Tozzo, whose second show ever was a rooftop set at SXSW. Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys heard the music drifting down, took a while to track them down, and signed them to his label. He produced their debut album, ¡Qué Bárbaro!, at his studio in Nashville, where they cut it live in the room. It came out August 28, and the band heads out on West Coast dates in October.
The name refers to Colombian shamans who guide lost souls to peace, which Sánchez has translated for their purposes: “The way we think about it is we usher souls to the dancefloor.”
Dish of the week
5280 Burger & Taphouse · What the Guac
This week’s dish is What the Guac at 5280 Burger & Taphouse, sent in by the restaurant. An angus patty, hickory smoked bacon, cheddar, guacamole, lettuce, and a housemade roasted garlic aioli doing the heavy lifting. One of their own team members describes it as “saucy, guac-y, glorious,” which is three words I am not going to improve on.
One more thing.
If fifteen dollars and a crowd is not your idea of a Saturday, the same colony leaves from under that same bridge every night this month, for free. Stand on the bridge deck or drop down to the trail below it about twenty minutes before sunset, and bring something to sit on.
See you next Thursday.
P.S. The two features above are the start of something I want to keep doing. If you know someone in this city who makes something worth knowing about, the whole run of them lives here.