Sixth Street Survivors

Old Pecan Street Cafe

Sunday, 9am-3pm

Longevity in the restaurant business is a rare and remarkable accomplishment. A while back, a reader e-mailed asking why we’d never written about the Paradise Cafe, considering its 23-year track record of success in the Sixth Street entertainment district. I dispatched Barbara Chisholm to check out the Paradise (see p.47) but quickly realized that it wasn’t fair to laud 23 years in business without also tipping our hat to the longest-running restaurant operation in the same neighborhood. The Old Pecan Street Cafe has been in business for 32 years, long before Sixth Street as we know it today even existed. The Cafe, the original Antone’s location, and Gordo’s Billiards were businesses that pioneered the long-abandoned hub of downtown commerce and laid the foundation for future development.

I took a great deal of nostalgia with me on my recent visit to the Old Pecan Street Cafe. The year it opened, Pecan Street quickly became the first official restaurant hangout for a group of students living in a West Campus co-op house. Some friends investigated a pool of light spilling out into the deserted downtown street on a late-night bike ride. They came back to the house bragging about the great new place they’d discovered. The turn-of-the-19th-century building was long and narrow, with high ceilings, limestone walls, old hardwood floors, and a small, vine-covered patio in back. Over the next few years, various members of our group spent evenings around tables in the quaint cafe. With Billie Holiday singing mournfully on the sound system, we discovered such then-exotic dishes as Croque Monsieur sandwiches, Steak au Poivre, crepes, and quiche. Along with big slabs of Fat Chocolate cake, we luxuriated in cups of marvelous fresh-ground coffee that the cafe bought from a new shop called Anderson & Co. In those early years, several of us even worked there, cooking or waiting tables in long, starched, white aprons. It was our place.

Graduation brought change and dispersion to our group, while development of the nascent “entertainment district” brought changes to the cafe. We lost touch. The ownership changed hands and the restaurant expanded, moving from 314 E. Sixth to the larger two-story space at 310. The move provided bigger dining rooms, much larger kitchen and bakery facilities, and, eventually, an upstairs banquet room for weddings and parties. During those days, the Old Pecan Street Cafe maintained a reputation for having the best desserts in town, and it owned the “Best Dessert” category in the early days of the Chronicle Restaurant Poll. As Austin’s restaurant scene has become more diverse and sophisticated, Pecan Street has dropped off many locals’ radar screens, but the restaurant still does an active business with downtown workers and tourists, as well as a large number of rehearsal dinners and wedding receptions.

A new friend joined me on my recent sentimental journey back to the Old Pecan Street Cafe. The plant-lined windows in the front dining room were open to the street, creating a sidewalk cafe feel. A Billie Holiday recording was indeed playing in the background. Our waitress wore a long, starched, white apron, and many of the menu items were described exactly as they had been in the beginning. Of all the dishes we tried, the dessert crepes Guilans ($3.95), with sautéed bananas, almonds, and light rum, was the only one that tasted the way I remembered. – Virginia B. Wood

This article appears in June 4 • 2004.