“Life is not promised tomorrow,” says Traphouse Caribbean owner/chef Dante Foster from his restaurant at 310 Colorado. As we chat over a Red Stripe, gentle Afrobeats tracks play in the background.
While it’s an apt proverb for club life in Austin’s warehouse district, Foster actually arrived at that epiphany during his time as a director at a local senior community during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Bay Area native, whose family includes Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, and Africans, took it upon himself to accomplish his dream of having his own restaurant.
“I thought, let me start before it’s too late,” he says, pointing out that “one thing about Austin was that it lacked Caribbean food, especially Downtown.”
After spending two years perfecting his menu via pop-ups, dinner parties, and farmers’ markets, Foster got his shot at a Downtown location when Coconut Club let him do a brunch pop-up. For the next two years, he worked in the kitchen next door at Cuatro Gato, which shared the building with Coconut Club and Neon Grotto. Eventually the Traphouse team took over the lease for Cuatro Gato and now has that space to themselves, which they recently remodeled for a grand opening earlier this year.
“We changed it to a more restaurant/lounge vibey feel. It’s not too many places in Downtown Austin where it’s a chill, relaxed vibe where you can sit down, get some good food, and listen to some Caribbean music, old school hip-hop, and R&B,” Foster says about the restaurant’s current setup.
He elaborates, “It’s a blessing to get the opportunity with a prime location, but we’re a small business where it’s just me and my other business partner Alvin [Toledo]. We don’t have a bunch of people backing us, so being around these huge restaurants, chains, and hospitality groups down here [can be a challenge], but people from Austin love to support local businesses so we do well.”
I stopped by a few times to try out a variety of menu items such as their phatties (based on Jamaican beef patties) and tacos, accompanied with some tostones and drinks like Trap Juice (a mixture of mango, pineapple, and guava) and hibiscus mint tea.
“Most of the things on the menu are Jamaican influenced, but we wanted to broaden it a little more, so that’s why we have stuff like tostones, yucca fries – things that make it a little more Caribbean,” Foster says.
“We also have a little bit of soul too. We like to highlight the African diaspora with stuff like jollof rice or fried escovitch fish, and sometimes we do Guatemalan tamales,” he adds. Vegan and vegetarian options are also available – a rarity for Caribbean menus, the chef says.
I also had to try Traphouse’s loaded mac and cheese – a classic stoner meal – along with their new special, oxtail fried rice. “Things like soul food and oxtail, you can’t get those at places Downtown,” Foster points out. “Oxtails are hard to cook, it takes a long time, and we do a good job at it. It’s our number one seller and we highlight it – we’ve got oxtail plates, phatties, tacos. We’re about to have a whole menu around it.”
Traphouse has become an extremely popular nighttime destination, especially on the weekend, Foster explains. “On the weekends we’ve got DJs at night, happy hours, and we don’t stop serving food until 2am,” he says. Plus, “it’s great to be connected to Coconut Club and Neon Grotto because it’s free to get in here and usually it’s less than $10 to get into those two areas. So if you ever come between Thursday and Saturday nights, you pay one cover and get into three clubs with two rooftops.”
Offering a plethora of international music and cuisine away from the madness of Sixth Street, Foster refers to Traphouse as a “free love spot.”
“Our goal this year is to let people know, ‘Hey, we are here, we’re a Black- and brown-owned local business, and it’s a great vibe here,’” he says.
This article appears in April 11 • 2025.
