Aidan Bowie and the Dead Rabbit staff mixed cocktails at a crowded Nickel City pop-up last month.
Chris O'Connell/MySAOn a cold Wednesday in January, popular Austin bar Nickel City is slammed. Bellies up to the bar and backs to the wall, the long, thin watering hole has thirsty patrons lined five-deep waiting for cocktails. Outside, a line snakes east to the end of the block.
Christmas is over, so drunk Santas and scantily clad elves are nowhere to be seen. Moe's Tavern, Nickel City's annual full-bar Halloween costume, is long gone. So why are folks clamoring to get inside the (admittedly very good) bar at 7 p.m. on a school night?
As we reported last year, the Dead Rabbit, a New York institution once named World's Best Cocktail Bar by Tales of the Cocktail Foundation, is coming to Austin's Sixth Street in 2023. On Irish Coffee Day — there is a day for everything, even good stuff — staff from the Irish pub took over a portion of the bar at Nickel City for a pop-up, a portion of the proceeds from which benefited Austin service industry mental health organization Heard.
It appears there is some momentum for well-marketed Irish pubs, so I ask Director of Operations Laura Torres when Dirty Sixth will be graced with the Dead Rabbit, which does not yet have an official opening date.
"May ... June-ish," she says, with a hint of trepidation. "We're on the precipice."
The hinges of the Nickel City door is on the precipice as the clock hits 7:30. At first, the whole thing doesn't make much sense. An Irish pub in Austin isn't news, not really. We have any number of goofy bars in this city at which bros can chase Jameson with Guinness while that Dropkick Murphys song blares. We've also had fancy New York bars (Weather Up comes to mind) that have tried, in vain, to parachute into Austin.
Irish Coffee Day made for an obvious date for the Dead Rabbit to take over Nickel City.
Chris O'Connell/MySADead Rabbit's recipe for success
Belfast-born Dead Rabbit owner Jack McGarry, who opened the now-world famous New York pub in 2013 with Sean Muldoon, flinches at both characterizations. (Muldoon left the company earlier this year.)
He says that all Irish pubs aren't created equal. Specifically, he says he's sick of the "leprechaun-ization of Irish culture." He also insists that the Dead Rabbit is not a New York bar, and thus opening an outpost in Austin isn't like trying to transport something that works in Manhattan (an upscale, expensive place) to Austin (just kind of expensive).
The Dead Rabbit is an Irish pub, or an American bar that celebrates the rich history of the Irish pub and contemporary Ireland. McGarry says that for importing the Dead Rabbit to Austin, they identified the key ingredients that have made the pub such a success in New York.
They include great food (no frozen chips, or, fries, for us Yankees), authenticity (the hand soaps in the bathrooms are made in Ireland, artwork and music is by contemporary Irish artists), and cocktails (Irish whisky, Irish beers, and Irish coffee).
The last element, McGarry says, is an important one: speed.
"I detest going into cocktail bars and everything takes forever," he says.
At the Nickel City pop-up, his words don't ring hollow. Dead Rabbit Beverage Director Aidan Bowie has flown in for the occasion, and he's behind the bar whipping up Irish coffees by the dozen and big batches of a delicious cocktail called Taking Liberties, made with two kinds of Irish whiskey, rum, cacao husk, and vanilla.
Bowie slings drinks composed of five ingredients nearly as quickly as it would take to pour a pitcher of Guinness with a smile on his face, which, to be honest, does little to make a dent in the ever-growing crowd. But it makes everyone inside rather chipper, as the fervor for an authentic Dead Rabbit Irish coffee expands into the evening hours.
A rendering of the new Dead Rabbit space on Sixth Street in downtown Austin.
courtesy of the Dead RabbitMixing it up on Sixth Street
It's an odd pairing on its face — a successful Austin (and Fort Worth) bar doing promo for an incoming rival. Torres calls Nickel City owner Travis Tober "a dear friend," and says that his staff stops by their place annually during a company outing to New York.
"It's all collaboration, and it's so key because we're all working together," she says. "We're all communities, and we want to join this community."
In just a few short months, that community will include slurring youngsters who have wandered in from Dead Rabbit neighbors like Coyote Ugly Saloon and Pete's Dueling Piano Bar. McGarry is ready for all-comers, including tourists, college students, and those who know the bar already, like many of the patrons lined up for drinks at Nickel City.
"We're obviously aware of the connotations surrounding Sixth Street," McGarry says. "But we're also cognizant of the work that's being done on a city level to counter some of those issues. And we're also aware of the some of the other developers coming in to gentrify it."
I ask him if he'd rather he was coming in a few years, after the much-publicized Sixth Street redevelopment plan was farther along.
"It would be misleading of me or illogical to say that I wouldn't prefer that Sixth was already perfect," McGarry says.
But the prospect of being in the first wave of a downtown revitalization doesn't scare him. He says it was tumbleweeds when the Dead Rabbit moved into New York City's Financial District, an area of Manhattan not particularly renowned for its nightlife scene.
"It's definitely part of the appeal of going in there early," he says, "of being part of that movement of restoring Sixth Street to its former glory."