Best-of list · City Guide
The best bars in Austin right now — from East 6th craft cocktail rooms to Rainey Street beer gardens and the hidden gems that locals actually drink in.
The short answer
10 ranked rooms follow. How we picked is at the end of this guide.
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.
How we picked
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.
Last reviewed 2026-05-08 · The editors recheck hours and closures against current local coverage.