The Net
The Net 1995. Directed by Irwin Winkler, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Sandra Bullock, Jeremy Northam, Dennis Miller, Diane Baker. The Net is the first of several new movies that tap into the growing national fear of becoming roadkill on the information highway. No one will be dissuaded from their paranoia by The…
Best Mural/Graffiti
Jimmy Cliff still reigns supreme, a tribute to the city’s love of Carlos Lowry’s massive masterpiece, maintained intact by the good folks who turned the Varsity into a Tower.
Best Bar To Drink Alone
With the popularity of this watering hole at an all-time high, it’s a great spot to lose yourself in the crowd. Or you may just find a soulmate in the throng. Either way, now, as always, the atmosphere says bar with a capital “B.”
Best Movie Theatre Concession Stand
Alongside the ubiquitous Milk Duds and Red Hots, the Dobie sweet shop offers chocolate-covered espresso beans, butter-toffee peanuts, and popcorn to die for. The food is so good, we’d come here even if they didn’t show such terrific flicks.
Best Wine Selection (Retail)
We’re not talking boxes of blush here. With over 2,000 labels (from local to imported) to choose from (including “Twig Wine” – which comes with a piece of vine in the bottle) and prices from under $10 up to $80, C.M. takes the crown again this year.
Best Outdoor Patio
Not for nothing was this Barton Springs eatery named what it was. With a veritable forest of lovely trees to umbrella it, Shady Grove offers sweet respite from the Central Texas sun at its most brutal (and hearty food, to boot).
Best Children’s Shoe Store
We all know kids run and grow faster when they’re wearing Power Ranger sneaks or Pocahontas mocs. This is the place for just those things. Not just a wide selection, but a selection of wide-width shoes, too.
Best Local Columnist
So the pen really is mightier than the sword. Wouldn’t it be fun to have these Statesman stalwarts hold a tie-breaking duel?
Best Tv Newscast
Keeping cutesy crap to a minimum no doubt helped KVUE win again as our readers’ favorite. Can’t hurt that they stayed put on the same bat channel in this turbulent TV year.
Best Place To Skate
This Northcross Mall rink is our very own version of Rockefeller Plaza.
Best Rumor
Actually, this was our April Fools Day spoof for 1994; this year we just closed down for general lack of interest, remember? But it was probably a better premise, anyway, so we’re happy to get the belated recognition. (Advance warning: we’re already planning big changes for 1996 – a whole new era for the Chronicle.)
Best Shoe Repair
The business that can heel what ails your footwear.
Best Public Art
Going to Barton Springs is more glorious than ever since this statue’s arrival. Now, every visit takes one by three illustrious Spirits of Austin Past – naturalist Roy Bedichek, historian Walter Prescott Webb, and folklorist J. Frank Dobie – engaged, as they often were in life, in lively conversation by the springs. Sculptor Glenna Goodacre’s…
Best New Poetry Reading
A year ago, Cafe Solaire wasn’t even on the Austin poetry map, but thanks to Thom the World Poet’s energetic PR and the Congress Avenue cafe’s own cozy charm, Monday nights at Solaire have grown from sparsely attended events to the place where you’re most likely to find representatives from all factions within the local…
Best Place To See A Musician Onstage
This young theatre group which emerged last year with a series of on-the-edge, original works has given local musicians a chance to work on a different stage. Swangkee Lowtel’s Jack Conover and Chad Nichols, singer Molly Rice (ex-Seizureville), Lowbrow’s Jacob Schulze, and the Gay Sportcasters’ Nashville Bill have appeared in SVT shows, and they’ve been…
Best Beef Eater’s Paradise
Not to be confused with the Dallas chain that has set up shop out on the interstate, this pleasant downtown beefery is a favorite place for the carnivores among us. Chef/owner Chris Mertens doesn’t bother with faux boots and saddles; he just puts a great meal on the table. Judging by the crowds during the…
Best New Barbeque Joint In Heaven
If it’s heaven, there must be good barbecue. As of last month, the legendary Stubbs is serving up his special brand of smoked meats to the likes of Lubbock native Buddy Holly and being reunited with Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Best Periodicals Rack
Kevin, at the Central Park location, says, “We have a diverse selection with everything from literary journals to stuff in the gen-x sub-category.” And with those Bookstop discounts – 10% off, with an extra 10% if you have Bookstop card – you can save enough to buy one more book than you thought you could.
Best Cemetery To Browse
Step through the gates and back in time to another era. A place where the final chapter in the lives of some of Austin’s earliest citizens are laid to eternal rest under ornate, Victorian headstones and iron work. Established in 1839, Oakwood has a host of notables from Austin history – from A.J. Zilker to…
Best Groundbreaking
The kids in this Southeast Austin neighborhood are due for some positive attention and entertainment. This new multi-purpose activity center, begun in July should be ready before summer rolls around again.
Best Local Action From Your Laz-e-boy
When they say “action,” they mean music. Here’s the best bet to catch the latest on what’s up in the clubs. Every Sunday (10pm) and Monday (10:30pm), supervixens Tara Veneruso and Chronicle editor Margaret Moser dish on local gossip, sample fine cigars, flash their pick for gig flyer of the week, and give the best…
Best Roadmap To The I-way
First and still one of the best. Though creator Brian Combs has moved on to build Austin Web Publishing, Inc., webmaster Shelly Hatfield has taken the reins and continues to make this site shine. If you’re looking for Austin cyberspots on the Web, then point your browser at Quadralay’s hotlists and soon you’ll be cruisin’…
Best Cheap Tropical Vacation
When we visited their toasty, humid greenhouses one blustery winter day, we were tempted to ask for a sweet rum drink with an umbrella in it, and to stretch out underneath the towering palms, ficus, and elephant ears. You can buy a chunk of the tropics to take home with you, too.
Best Argument Against Zero Tolerance
Ingram, a former Dripping Springs student, was expelled last winter when under question-able conditions, officials found a marijuana roach in his truck. While Ingram intends to begin college in the fall, he feels cheated of his education for something, he argues convincingly, he didn’t do.
Best Transit Decision In Quite Some Time
In a magnanimous Christmas gift to the citizens of Austin, the ATS decided last December to cancel plans for several new roads and street expansions over the Edwards Aquifer/Barton Springs Contributing Zone. The decision is not only ecologically sound, but is expected to save taxpayers at least $47 million in construction and land-acquisition costs.
Best Options When You Just Can’t Cook
Austin is the birthplace of two of the best service ideas in the country. You can subscribe to Dinner at Your Doorstep by the month, by the week, or call for same day delivery of any number of their freshly prepared, delicious meals. We are especially fond of their new drive-by kiosk on Far West…
Best Way To Get Into A Locked Car
Outside looking in (…at your keys dangling from the ignition)? Call the newly merged American/Yellow Checker Cab Company. They come quickly, charge $25 to get you back behind the wheel, and before you can say, “Slim Jim,” you’re driving away.
Best Overall Selection
We couldn’t decide between the striped, full-length dungarees or the trendy, canvas overall shorts, so we left with a snappy engineer’s hat instead. Their stunning selection of sunglasses, none over 10 bucks, features rhinestones or purple lenses or scalloped fans shooting from the temple. And the gimme caps are embroidered with symbols and logos just…
Virtuosity
Virtuosity 1995, R, 106 min. Directed by Brett Leonard, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Denzel Washington, Kelly Lynch, Russell Crowe, Stephen Spinella, William Forsythe, Louise Fletcher. Director Leonard returns to the virtual reality setting of his previous film, The Lawnmower Man, with this sophomore effort that asks the burning question: “What would happen…
Best Neon
The moving cows at the Sixth Street location really wow ’em, but don’t miss the new art at the latest location on Guadalupe.
Best Beer Selection
Remember when you were a kid and were leaving the grocery store and the wall was lined with gumball machines and you were ready to faint at all the choices? Well, that’s how it feels when you enter the Gingerman and see the wall behind the bar just bursting with taps – 80, to be…
Best Movie Theatre Facilities
A return win for one of the cleanest, comfiest, most state-of-the-art cinemas in the city.
Best All You Can Eat
Let’s say you have 10 bucks, two kids, and three killer appetites. Then it’s time to meet Mr. Gatti for lunch. You drop $3.49, the kids spring 99 cents each, and you can all stuff yourselves silly on cheese stix, garlic stix, salad, dessert and, oh yeah, pizza.
Best Place To Impress Out-of-Towners
This place will lend itself very well to your proclamation that everything is bigger in Texas. Before taking your visiting guests here, tell them “Oh, it’s one of the smaller cafes.” Watch their faces as they take in the 1,200 available seats.
Best Children’s Video Selection
Scores of vids for kids of all ages, from the venerable Disney animated classics of yore to the prime-time ‘toons of today, with everything in between.
Best Local Web Site
See for yourself
Best TV Reporter
Quick on his feet, swift on his swing, here is a feature reporter who knows how to really sniff out the interesting characters in town and get down and dirty with them.
Best Scenic Drive (in-town)
Sooner or later you will succumb to bluebonnet portraits. Even if you’re sans Nikon, there is no denying that a leisurely cruise de loop, when the wildflowers are out in full force, will soothe the stressed-out mind.
Best Texas Legislator
The senator goes down this session as a man willing to take a stand, in this case, a stand for 17 hours in a filibuster against Rep. Susan Combs’ attempt to limit Austin’s annexation powers. The filibuster failed, but Barrientos won a compromise with his bill, SB 1395.
Best Adult Bookstore
What do you think of when you think “adult bookstore”? Throw all that out the window – Dreamers is bright, cheery, tastefully decorated, with a sharp and friendly staff. Massive selection of videos, including classics, but also a variety of lingerie, massage oils, etc.
Best Resurrection Of An Austin Landmark
Central: Bertram’s We just can’t say enough good things about this wonderful new restaurant, recently opened in the historic Bertram’s Mercantile Building at 16th and Guadalupe. Ask your waitperson for a tour of the basement to see the tunnel that led to Mr. Bertram’s conveniently located brothel next door. Seems that the fine, upstanding businessmen…
Best Photography Gallery
It’s not easy to sell photography as art. The world is full of Kodak moments and people who can’t distinguish between Ansel Adams and their summer vacation slides from Yosemite. Pro-Jex perseveres where lesser spirits have faltered, continuing to promote both established and emerging photographers in their tiny, cluttered, but nonetheless effective space.
Best Re-invention Of An Eastside Tradition
Johnny Holmes’ Victory Grill was once Austin’s premier venue for the biggest names in R&B and soul in the Fifties and Sixties, from Bobby Blue Bland and Ike & Tina Turner to locals T.D. Bell and Erbie Bowser. Though Holmes has long since retired, the newly reopened Grill has expanded its cultural vision to include…
Best Cheap Breakfast Come-Back
Here’s the perfect spot to get away from the usual crowd – as long as you can settle for just one flavor of coffee. For a while there, it looked like the Frisco was going the route of its parent company, the Nighthawk – to the land of legend, of mere memory. Earning its place…
Best New Reason To Go Downtown
It seems there is a great new eatery, coffeehouse, or watering hole on the Avenue every time we go downtown. Regulars on the scene note that the atmosphere is not nearly so rowdy as on Sixth Street and not quite as chi-chi as the quickly developing west downtown district. Just good food, good drinks, and…
Best Pet Store (chain)
Our favorite guinea pig, Skinny, squeaks especially loud when treated to the exotic and tropical g. pig mix carried at PetSmart. And if you can’t make a choice, given there are zillions, you’re welcome to bring your pooch along to help.
Best Club Sign
Isabella Rosselini would be right at home crooning in front of the red neon sign on the blue velvet background behind the stage at Electric Lounge – it’s purely Lynchian. Then again, this logo-friendly script may be more at home on the front of a baseball jersey.
Best Indoor Playscape
A playscape for the mind and the body, the museum is as entertaining as it is challenging. At each visit, children (and their adult pals) can enjoy their favorite ongoing displays, from the grocery store mockup, complete with four food groups of consumables and donnable Whole Foods aprons, to STUFFEE, the room-sized doll whose removable…
Best Morning Twang
You may have already changed out of your vintage cowboy jammies by the time host Rod Moag starts spinning his partner-swingin’ favorites, but this show will inspire you to replace them with floor-skatin’ western boots and a bolo tie. Tune in to sweet nasty rockabilly bomp and the honey-smooth sounds of western swing classics to…
Best Convenience Store For Loitering
Bubba’s is the last beer stop before you leave Travis County on Camp Ben McCulloch Road (FM 1832). The selection runs from frosty domestics to Kirin to quarts of Mambo. And get this: They’ll open it for you at the counter and invite you to sit in one of the shagging couches on the porch…
Best City Council Action
Have you taken a walk down Congress Avenue lately? Austin’s downtown is actually becoming pedestrian-friendly, with coffee shops and restaurants now able to serve customers out on the avenue under shady trees and awnings. Bravo to the council, which passed this ordinance unanimously last year, for its most successful (and cheapest) attempt at downtown revitalization.
Most Effective Advocacy Group
Don’t mess with these folks. They play hardball politics, then go to church.
Best Personal Injury Lawyer & Will Writer Extraordinaire
Leonard Gabbay is a crack-whip personal injury lawyer who’ll make you glad you didn’t see that banana peel. And, when it comes to helping you set up your final testament, believe us, you: Where there’s a will, there really oughta be a Gabbay. 512/472-0404 www.lbglaw.com
Best Way To Lower Your Auto Insurance Rate
It’s no joke that taking a class in defensive driving can lower automobile insurance premiums by up to 10% and at the same time strike that moving violation from your license. Yes, there will be those darned traffic films, driving rules, and safety quizzes, but this time we found ourselves chuckling all the way through.…
Best Place To Buy Mexican Comic Books
Want to brush up on your Spanish and experience a little Mexican pop culture at the same time? Pick up a pocket-sized Mexican novela at Maldonado’s, where titles like Fuego en La Carne (Fire in the Flesh) and La Puerta Cerrada (The Closed Door) are sure to spark more interest than a textbook or language…
Waterworld
Waterworld 1995, PG-13, 135 min. Directed by Kevin Reynolds, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Kevin Costner, Dennis Hopper, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Tina Majorino, Michael Jeter, Zakes Mokae. If you can work your way past the monumental anti-hype and ill-will surrounding this most expensive of all films, you’ll find Reynolds and Costner’s enfant terrible of…
Best Public Artwork
A local hero, cast heroically, large as the big life he led. Not a day goes by that Stevie isn’t holding a new bunch of flowers, a fingerful of picks, or a note of appreciation brought by fans the world over.
Best Brew Pub
Whatever’s ale-ing you won’t be after you and your brew-ed hit a happy hour at this much-loved watering hole. Four beers are brewed on the premises year round and two seasonal, all going for $1 a pint daily between 5-6pm (with plenty of other happy-hour specials, too).
Best Movie Theatre Programming
The mix of cool independent work, fine foreign cinema, and the occasional sharp Hollywood flick, juggled over four screens, ensures that there is always don’t-miss moviegoing here.
Best Bakery
How sweet it is, now celebrating 20 years of satisfying sweet teeth citywide. Check out Mimi Sheraton’s mambo tribute to owner Patricia Bauer-Slate’s pastry prowess in “Flour Power,” an extensive article in the June ’95 issue of New Woman magazine.
Best Quick Lunch
SUB-ordinate? No! SUB-missive? Nix nix! SUB-lime? Oh yes, yes, yes, baby. Give us another shot o’ thundersauce, will ya? Where to bolt when pangs of hunger flash through you like lightning? Duh, and but of course, to the ‘Cloud, where a bevy of yummy Thunderbunnies stand eager to serve you.
Best Place To Have A B-day Party
Worst place to have a hangover, according to our source, who nonetheless couldn’t deny that the kids had fun at warp speed for the first hour, then spent 30 minutes in a private party room being wildly entertained by a poker-faced but fun-funny employee in an inside-out shirt (performing samurai maneuvers come cake-cutting time).
Best Local Writer
The divine Ms. W takes the crown again. Pencil yourself in for one of her local readings or tune in to All Things Considered to hear her jam a million great and zany and thoughtful and provocative (oh yes, provocative) words into too few minutes.
Best Weather Person
Following a brief exit from TV weather, Kimmel took his meteorological skills to Channel 7 and again proved that, when it comes to his forecasts, things are always clear.
Best Scenic Drive (out-of-town)
Over hill and over dale – a chance to put your utility vehicle to some real use and another chance to see billions of wildflowers in the spring, as color bursts all around you.
Best Alterations
And sew, once again and with no needling necessary, the readers decided an Ace Tailor up the sleeve is the best way to clothes the wound of ill-fitting threads.
Best Antiques
Antiques from the world over, some dating back a couple of hundred years, located in a most hospitable environment.
Best Sentimental Journey
Imagine a laconic, mint julep-sippin’ afternoon, poolside, under a brush of bamboo and palm, with the afternoon sun glinting off of the white stucco and red, Spanish tile. This three-tiered marvel of a motel was originally built in 1938 and even through disheveled periods of disrepair recalls the simpler elegance of a bygone era -…
Best Rapidly Growing Cultural Event
This annual event sponsored by the Native American Parent’s Committee expected a modest 200 attendees in its first year; they got 2,000. Last year’s event, staged at the Berger Center, drew 15,000 attendees, and 20,000 are expected this November.
Best Reason Not To Serve Liquor
Other brewpubs in town are steaming over the fact that Waterloo is the only brewery in town that can legally have live outdoor music, drinking on the patio, and beer to go. The reason? The ‘loo is the only one that doesn’t serve hard liquor, leaving them without the legal hassle other houses of the…
Best Chef Line-Up
Where else could you chat with the best chefs in town (Stewart Scruggs, Charles Mayes, Mike Ravago, David Garrido, Jeff Blank, to name only a few), the best chefs in the state (Jay McCarthy of Cascabel in San Antonio, Stephan Pyles of Star Canyon in Dallas), and the top cookbook authors in the country (Martha…
Best Of Show
Judges at the recent Fancy Food Show in New York just validated what we have known for years: that Timpone’s smoky Salsa Muy Rica, chock full of garlic cloves, is true salsa nirvana. Our congratulations to Patrick Timpone and his hardworking salsa staff.
Best Pharmacy/ Drugstore
Back again this year, one place where you can just say yes to drugs and nostalgic wonder.
Best Continually Inhabited Historic Home
Otherwise known as the home of Boggy Creek farmers Larry Butler and Carol Ann Sayle, this white frame Greek Revival-style house has been home to Capitol-area farm families since the days of the Republic. The other two local historic homes that date to the same era (The Paggi House and the French Legation) have long…
Best Interactive City Park
We were saddened to learn that budget cuts may mean the end for one of our favorite kid-friendly parks at Sprinkle Cutoff Road. Check out this little oasis of living history that illustrates farm life in 1880s Central Texas while you still can.
Best Multimedia Design Firm
Human Code is snapping up awards left and right for their high-quality interactive media designs, most recently for their adaptation of Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe. With well-honed material combined with gorgeous visual artistry, rock-solid programming, and lush audio textures, these CD-ROM gurus are a one-stop creativity shop if you’re looking to make…
Best Sports Headline
When the U. of Georgia Women’s Basketball team took advantage of a Lady Horn cold streak in February, someone at the Statesman sports desk saw their chance.
Best Cool Tootsie Dangle & Daydream Zone
Deep Eddy is mostly known for its kid-friendly vibes and sparkling pool. We know couples who go there just to daydream about having li’l tikes of their own someday. While your reveries may not revolve around potential progeny, Deep Eddy’s small pier on the north bank of Town Lake is the perfect spot to kick…
Best Community Leader
Feted as one of the saviors of American democracy, Cortés has also been called one of the most powerful people in Texas. He is the founder of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), whose local chapter is Austin Interfaith. Under Cortés’ fiery leadership, this multi-denominational organization has achieved a community-based political power, focusing on education, social…
Most Tenacious City Department
It’s been a rough year for Austin’s utility: It can’t seem to get rid of the city’s share of the South Texas Project nuclear plant; it has endured constant haranguing for the Holly Power Plant; the Legislature is threatening to open the market to independent power producers; and Mayor Bruce Todd keeps trying to sell…
Best Place For Active Organ Grinders
Joys in the ‘hood include: affordable exams, cheap methods of controlling and/or eliminating those pesky active sperm that can wreck a gal’s whole month, free advice, and never, ever any passing of condescending judgement even if you arrive in a condition that suggests you haven’t behaved in current recommended manners of safety and caution.
Best Way To Pamper & Board Your Pets At The Same Time
Every pet owner knows how hard it can be to drop off their beloved bow-wow or feline at the kennel, and then enjoy vacation or leisure time without feeling some sense of underlying guilt. Will the experience leave them forever traumatized with recurrent flashbacks of being in the slammer? While there is no solution to…
Best Place To Rent Adult Videos
Of all the adult movie rental places we’ve been, this is the store with the most normal atmosphere. Folks just like us – out for a little forbidden fun – browse through the well-organized titles. Careful not to glance at each other’s selections (a strange politeness in this oddly intimate place), we move silently through…
The Jar
The Jar Directed by Ebrahim Foruzesh, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Behzad Khodeaveisi, Fatemeh Azrah, Haji. We’re told that there is a flourishing film movement afoot in Iran. Unfortunately, few of these works make it to these shores. Thus, the screening of the award-winning The Jar is an exceptional occasion and a rare…
Best Romantic Spot
Better than a sonnet. Cheaper than a bottle of wine. Quicker to get to than the ocean. Want to win somebody’s heart? Take them here to see a sunset; you won’t have to say a word.
Best Coldest Beer
Monte, the cool (not cold) G.M. of the Sixth Street location, swears he would tell us if he thought the readers were mistaken. But he doesn’t. And he says the brew at the ‘house hovers just above freezing (that’s 35 degrees to you and me.) Brrrrrrrrew-tal, man.
Best Neighborhood Bar
You say you want Deep Eddy Pool, sans sun and water? Then cool off and cue up at this ever-shady (as in cool and dark, not evil) establishment. Wet your whistle, not your swimsuit.
Best Bakery, Pastries
How sweet it is, now celebrating 20 years of satisfying sweet teeth citywide. Check out Mimi Sheraton’s mambo tribute to owner Patricia Bauer-Slate’s pastry prowess in “Flour Power,” an extensive article in the June ’95 issue of New Woman magazine.
Best Restaurant With A View
This place will lend itself very well to your proclamation that everything is bigger in Texas. Before taking your visiting guests here, tell them “Oh, it’s one of the smaller cafes.” Watch their faces as they take in the 1,200 available seats.
Best Playscape
Make ’em sweat on the playscape, make ’em chill out in Barton Springs, make ’em love learning at the nature center, make ’em laugh cheap with a bag of duck or pigeon feed.
Best Morning Deejay (or Team)
These returning champs are no longer content just to ride the airwaves. These days they surf the Net, too. Tune in for details.
Best Basketball Court/Game
There would be no basketball without the center and this court’s location makes it accessible to the hottest-shot players from all over the city.
Best Softball Field
Not what your mama meant when she discussed good grooming, but well-kempt nonetheless. With fields dubbed Fenway, Wrigley, and Comiskey, you can feign you’re batting in the big leagues here.
Best Appliance/Tv Repair
When your cathode-ray needs caressing, this repair shop has a touch that’s almost magical.
Best Art Supplies
From puff paint to pastels, the abundant aisles contain everything that appeals to artsy-craftists and crafty artists citywide.
Best Sign Indicating Nothing
What’s up with that? The old haunt’s been gone for years but the sign blazes on. Because of its campus proximity, it’s a great frosh confounder. Heading for flat fajitas, the newbies must be pleasantly surprised by the yummy, all-natural barbecue offered instead.
Best Studio Space
Their recently featured photos in Detour notwithstanding, Holy 8 Ball is a perfect example of the local art scene we could be creating in our town. Photographers Bruce Dye and Minh Carrico, graphic artist Lee Bolton, and multimedia genius-boy and former Chronicle art director Ben Davis set up shop in East Austin, blazing a trail…
Best Reason To Still Be In Your Jammies At 5pm On A Saturday
Kick back on the comfy velveteen couch, sip that grande moccachino – or even a beer – and get ready for a full frontal cartoon assault hosted by the Chronicle’s own Ken Lieck. Will it be the existential, anarchic musings of Duckman? Vintage WWII propaganda cartoons? The Critic? The Simpsons? Or something that even the…
Best Chocolate Desserts
We’ve eaten desserts all over town in the past year and it just comes down to a tie between these two popular spots. On Valentine’s Day, Zoot pastry chef Craig Bushey blew us away with an exquisite heart-shaped creation of sponge cake, chocolate mousse cake, ganache, fresh berries, and whipped cream topped with a solid…
Best One-Two Cholesterol Punch
Every so often, our resolve to eat things that will prolong life – green, leafy vegetables, fresh fruit, bran – is swept away in a flood of craving for food that’s really tasty and really bad: salt, sugar, fat. When this Dining Death Wish hits, we enrapture our taste buds while plugging up our arteries…
Best Record Store (Chain)
Dare we say Best Record Store, Period? A totally user-friendly environment, with a staff that will recommend good stuff, let you listen to anything, and let you bring it back (for credit) if you change your mind.
Best Romantic Dining Spot
Chef Jean-Louis DeHoux and his talented staff have created a charming, comfortable little get-away that is the perfect restaurant in which to fall in love, get engaged, and celebrate an anniversary, according to good friends of ours who have done it all there. Maybe it’s the relaxed atmosphere of a European country restaurant, the red…
Best Interactive Experience
The Austin Zoo, formerly Good Day Ranch, gives kids a chance to see and touch those furry little animals they read about in books. It used to be that children grew up with more opportunities to learn first-hand about animals, but as society becomes more urban, places like the Austin Zoo are about their only…
Best New Environmental Directory
Compiled by T. Paul Robbins, it contains damn near everything you need to know to be lean and green. Write PO Box 1374, Austin, TX 78767 to get one.
Best Statesman Headline
Alliterating b’s are particularly popular at the paper (another winning entry proclaimed “Bikers boost Barbara Bush with back-cover blurb”). And if you like puns, how about this one for a story on the Internet in the traditionally stodgy business section: “Web Wilder with Growth”.
Best Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe, Or Place To Do It Outside
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep. Let’s get lost… When we want to get lost, we go to Mayfield Park on a weekday afternoon. A blanket, a couple of cool, refreshing beverages, and a companion are all the supplies you need to enjoy the peacocks, ponds and sun-dappled hiking trails. And if you wish…
Best Council Regular
Peña attends nearly every city council meeting, often to speak about homelessness issues and the need for a juvenile detoxification center in East Austin. He traveled to Washington, D.C. last year to try to find funding for such a center and is credited with originating the city-wide curfew ordinance. Peña spends four nights a week…
Most Worthwhile City Study
Released last January, this committee report outlines 12 steps to turning Austin into a sustainable, compact, livable city with a strong tax base. Maybe next year we can give an award to whomever begins to implement it.
Best Place That Really Sucks
They carried our lime-green dinosaur in from the car without laughing. They didn’t try to sell us a new one (though we were sorely tempted by the industrial models, all brawn and shine). They cleaned, oiled, replaced clamps and belts while we waited (diversionary chat with accompanying two-year-old, no extra charge). Four dollars and 32…
Best Window Washer
Get a new outlook on life through those windows that haven’t been washed in who- knows-how-many years, and help a graduate student get closer to his Ph.D. at the same time. Kuipers does a terrific, efficient, unobtrusive job of shining your glass. He’ll do window repairs, too. But hurry, because he may be back to…
Best Relocation / Transformation Of A Food Store
Last year, South Austinites were miffed that Whole Foods, Brodie Oaks, was moving north of the river. But this year the neighborhood is rejoicing the relocation of Sun Harvest from the Southwood Shopping Center to WF’s vacated spot. Offering expanded selections of organic produce and meats and housing a deli, bakery, an Amy’s Ice Cream…
Bushwhacked
Bushwhacked 1995. Directed by Greg Beeman, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Daniel Stern, Jon Polito, Brad Sullivan, Ann Dowd, Blake Bashoff, Ari Greenberg. I once had a home economics teacher whose notion of culinary ingenuity revolved around the concept of a “basic dough.” This dough, so she said, could create a vast variety…
Best Annual Party
Pardon our acidic wit/this party is a giant hit. With all those costumes, it’s never a bore. What a sweet tribute to sad old Eeyore.
Best Country/Western Club
The most authentic Country Dance Corral in the city, where you can boot your scootie to the likes of Don Walser & His Pure Texas Band, Gary P. Nunn, The Geezinslaw Bros., Chris Wall, Alvin Crow, and the Derailers.
Best Non-downtown Club
Welcoming you with its gigantic Elvis sign above an aqua facade, the C.C. is too cool. And on the inside, it only gets better: hot acts eight days a week, an ancient pinball machine that benefits AIDS Services of Austin, dancing couples that look to have arrived by time warp. No wrong ever done here,…
Best Barbecue
Great big beef ribs they are, and best ordered all-you-can-eat. (But then, what isn’t?)
Best Salsa (Locally Made)
Part of the secret is that Timpone’s (maker of Rose’s) doesn’t let their product sit on the shelf for long. Actually, neither do the customers. If heaven is hot and chunky, then it’s in the jar marked Rose’s.
Best Storyteller
He’s easily spotted by his astonishing resemblance to Santa (a resemblance he puts to good use at Dallas’ NorthPark Mall every Yuletide), but there’s more to the man than apple cheeks and a snowy beard. He has an innate sensitivity to kids and a sense of how to unlock their imaginations through stories. He makes…
Best Newsstand
This is magazine avenue. With a long wall of rack after rack of magazines and newspapers from just about everywhere, you could easily kill a lunch hour just looking.
Best Bicycle Repair
The readers have spoke-en and decided that last year’s winner should be this year’s, too. With employees that know their helmets from their fanny packs.
Best Sporting Goods Store
Last year’s winner and still cham-peen. Test your skills and their products at the big store before you roll or dribble out the door.
Best Carpenter
The plane choice of Chron readers.
Best Audio Equipment
Popular for the speakers of the house, from poverty stricken boom box users to the blank check, “put me together some of them there fancy component” types.
Best Slab ‘o Concrete
This is the place to see and be seen seven days a week. Forget about tables and chairs – just hunker down on this hunk of cement, dangle your legs into the imaginary bay that is Fourth Street, and size up the sundry patrons going to and from Capitol City Playhouse, Cedar Street, and Gilligan’s,…
Best-run Arts Organization
With an attendance of 27,000, Austin Lyric Opera must be doing something right. Actually, ALO does a lot of things right. This professional arts company headed by director Joe McClain maintains a crack staff, stages traditional operas with incredible production values, and sells them with style. (Their “Brady Bunch” season campaign and “One Mad Clown”…
Best Salsa Dancing
The salsa at Calle Ocho is hot, spicy, and goes great with a margarita – the dancing, that is. On Wednesday evenings from 6-7pm, Alvaro Gomez gives semi-private lessons for $3 an hour, and on Thursdays and Fridays there are group lessons from 5-8pm with happy-hour specials on drinks. Dance to the fiery rhythms of…
Best Cookie Success Story
We salute super cookie baker Penny McClain for the success of her new East Austin wholesale cookie plant. Her scrumptious pastries are flying off the counters and shelves in local markets, and bags of her chocolate chip cookies are regular snacks on the flights of Southwest Airlines.
Best Pasta Shop
Central: Pasta & Co. Mary Lou Morales has been making excellent pasta in this busy shop on Austin’s quaintest shopping street for more than 12 years. In addition to fresh pasta, there are take-out lunch specials, frozen entrées, eggplant parmesan, and risotto, plus fabulous homemade breadsticks and biscotti. 3502 Kerbey Lane, 453-0633 South: Bottega de…
Best Record Store (Local)
Dare we say Best Record Store, Period? A totally user-friendly environment, with a staff that will recommend good stuff, let you listen to anything, and let you bring it back (for credit) if you change your mind.
Best Sushi
We can’t get enough of Musashino’s fresh, reasonably priced sushi or their exemplary service – the waitstaff carefully explains every piece of sushi, sashimi, or roll they bring to the table. The regular plate comes with seven pieces of sushi, three pieces of a roll, miso soup, and a salad; if you want to splurge,…
Best Kids’ Radio Show
Nearly all media is adult-oriented. With the exception of a few magazines and Disney movies, the vast majority of reading and programming out there is produced by adults for adults. But Austin’s newest radio station, KOOP-FM 91.7, has opened the airwaves to kids, creating a call-in radio talk show produced and hosted by kids. Marsha…
Best New Publication
We’re always a sucker for an energetic, student-run, left-wing rag, and (sub)Tex clearly meets this criteria. Produced on a shoe-string budget, each issue is written with the kind of passion that comes when you know you might not publish again. We hope they do. Look for the paper’s rack under the canopy at Wheatsville.
Best Statesman Ongoing Series
An opinionated and in-depth analysis of cultural trends and current events south of the border that appears in each Sunday’s “Insight” section, Garcia’s column is one of the Statesman’s must-read items. If only the rest of the paper could match his consistently impressive standard of excellence.
Best Golf Practice Range
This center offers a full range of golfing facilities on the site of the old drive-in theatre west of I-35. The driving range has St. Ed’s University as a backdrop, and besides having two greens to aim for, golfers can drive for a football goal post. In a little more than an hour at the…
Best Eastside Community Service
We salute Diane Hernandez and the staff at the “Happy Kitchen” Food School, who provide free cooking classes in English and Spanish to interested Eastside residents. For six weeks at a time, participants learn to prepare delicious, nutritious, and inexpensive meals, and take guided grocery shopping trips to learn how to get the most food…
Snazziest Uniforms
Perhaps you haven’t had as many nice encounters with them as we have. But you must admit, even when they’re working hard, they’re lookin’ good!
Best Place To Get A Buzz
Whether you’re a jarhead, a baby butch, or you just want your Power Ranger helmet to fit better, the best flattops, buzzcuts and hi’n’tights are at Pete’s. In business for over 27 years, the fellas at Pete’s will square off your dome for a reasonable price. Call ahead on the weekends – there’s usually a…
Best Women’s Resources
Counseling needs have certainly changed in the 20 years since WomenSpace began to address women’s problems through peer counseling in the mid-Seventies. Women’s Counseling & Resource Center (WCRC) developed from there. Today, WCRC has sessions on topics like codependency, family roles/parenting, sexual harassment, and assertiveness training. Austin Women’s Addiction Referral & Education Center (AWARE) tackles…
Best Reopening
Ah, Europa, Europa! After yielding its central Drag location to the ultrahip, corporate Urban Outfitters, Europa – one of the few known bookstores in the universe to combine the hepness and attitude of a used book boutique with the spaciousness and selection of a big chain store – has finally resurfaced. Nestled between the Magic…
Satin Steel
Satin Steel 1994. Directed by Clifton Ko, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Jade Leung, Anita Lee, Russell Wong. Kung-fu jungle cannibals, gun-running ventriloquist gangsters, and a vicious henchman with robotic arms all make appearances in Satin Steel, a trashy new action vehicle starring Black Cat heroine Jade Leung. Add to these oddball elements…
Best Art Gallery
Gorgeous landscaping for art’s sake on the outside. Art for your sake on the inside.
Best Cover Band Club
When we’re overwhelmed by that desire to snarf a couple of cold ones and sing along to words we sorta know ourselves, this veteran venue delivers. “Satisfaction” guaranteed.
Best Piano Bar
Tinkle tinkle little bar… wait, is that the player’s fingers on the keys or the soothing sounds of perfect little cubes tinkling against the confines of a cool, clear cocktail?
Best Caterer
Prairie Rock opened just last fall, and has already attracted a devoted following. European-trained, native Texan chef Deborah DeWitt “creates elegant and affordable menus, using the bold flavors of modern Southwestern cuisine, the richness of classic French, and the zest of the Mediterranean.”
Best Sandwich Shop/Chain
SUB-ordinate? No! SUB-missive? Nix nix! SUB-lime? Oh yes, yes, yes, baby. Give us another shot o’ thundersauce, will ya? Where to bolt when pangs of hunger flash through you like lightning? Duh, and but of course, to the ‘Cloud, where a bevy of yummy Thunderbunnies stand eager to serve you.
Best Swimming Spot
Future Olympian swimmer Henry reports: “It’s cooooold, mama. It’s fun.”
Best Pm Drive/Rush Hour Radio Program
Considering they don’t just offer insight on all things worldwide, but also add a liberal sprinkling of Austin’s own (such as Marion Winik and John Burnett), we couldn’t agree more with these picks.
Best Bicycle Shop
The readers have spoke-en and decided that last year’s winner should be this year’s, too. With employees that know their helmets from their fanny packs.
Best Swimming Hole
A hole with room enough for the toddler, the paddler, the Olympic stroke-meister, the exuberant diver, the sub-mariner, and the drifter, floating along on his back under the shade. Plenty of room, too, to stretch out in the sun after the water and warm up again.
Best Criminal Lawyer
And there are a lot of criminals in this town….
Best Bookstore
Kevin, at the Central Park location, says, “We have a diverse selection with everything from literary journals to stuff in the gen-x sub-category.” And with those Bookstop discounts – 10% off, with an extra 10% if you have Bookstop card – you can save enough to buy one more book than you thought you could.
Best Use Of Whimsy In Restaurant Decor
East: Taqueria Los Comales Drop in to this East Seventh Mexican eatery and take a look at the profusion of piñatas hanging from the very low ceiling. These folks have one of the best piñata selections in the city. 2136 E. Seventh, 480-9358 South: El Sol y La Luna The restaurant’s namesakes, the sun and…
Best Concept Band
Their own births postdated the Great Society beagle abuser’s fall from power, but the members of the Administration possessed a fixation on Lyndon Baines Johnson and his cadre that rivaled Robert Caro’s in intensity, if not longevity. Like the subject of their tuneage, they burned out early and declined a second term, leaving behind one…
Best Thing To Happen To Poster Art Since The Seventies
The fab four are to Austin poster art in the Nineties what Michael Priest, Guy Juke, Danny Garrett, and Jim Franklin were to the Seventies. Picking up from where Frank Kozik skewed local posters in the Eighties, these artists take off in their own retro-alternative and positively sonic senses of color and design. Most of…
Best Croutons
“A crouton is a crouton is a crouton” does not apply here. Freshly made with baked bread, olive oil, and a hint of garlic by the Central Market kitchen staff, these generous-sized morsels are then toasted to the highest crouton perfection: a delectable crunchy square of heaven. You’ll never go back to Pepperidge Farms again!
Best Picnic Provisions
Whether you’re out to simply pack the fixins for sandwiches or desire a fancier spread of ready-made gourmet fare, these connected businesses supply a portable summertime feast. The neighborhood Fresh Plus is the cream of the crop, with its sumptuous snacks, ample beer selection, and imported comestibles. Cook’s Night Out offers a large selection of…
Best Record Store (Vinyl)
Dare we say Best Record Store, Period? A totally user-friendly environment, with a staff that will recommend good stuff, let you listen to anything, and let you bring it back (for credit) if you change your mind.
Best Sweet / Salt Satiate
They’re crunchy! They’re salty! And they’re wallowing in whichever variety of the doctor’s chocolate you order – white, milk, or dark. You say you have a worthy contestant to sate this salt/sweet craving? Well, pardon our skepticism. Bring enough for everyone in the office and we’ll get back to you….
Best Of Times For Tots & Young-at-hearts
It’s a quiet kind of summer giddy that contents both child and adult alike as the Zilker Eagle rounds the bend and pulls into the station. The lemonade is perfect, the crossing bell chimes, and the conductor issues the “All Aboard” to signal that it’s time to take the tickets! The old Amtrak replica we…
Best New Statesman Feature To Imrove A Lagging Self-image
The Statesman’s newest addition to the “Life” section lets disgruntled readers sound off on everything from noisy babies to rude waitresses and unappreciatve immigrants.
Best Supermarket In Hyperspace
Well on their way to owning the entire specialty food market, the folks at Whole Foods Market have put together an informative, useful site on the World Wide Web where you’ll find recipes, consumer tips, and lore. Produced by Net-savvy design firm Go Media, this is a clear sign that all things Austin will soon…
Best In-Town Space For Positive Absorption Of Negative Ions
Nothing soothes the soul like the sound and feel of flowing water. When water smacks the surface – of rock, of skin, of other water – it creates an atmosphere that is positively refreshing. You can thank negative ions. And thank Austin for having the wherewithal to preserve so many lovely spots where these physical…
Best Fiction Writer
It’s a tie between her novel and her bill. A Perfect Match was the title of Combs’ first steamy, soft-porn novel, but it wasn’t her first stab at fiction. Claiming her “takings” bill wouldn’t harm Austin, other cities, or the state, Combs was victorious in both the House and Senate in winning landowners the right…
Best Acid Drop For Art’s Sake
An unassuming corrugated studio on the Eastside of Austin is home to Graphic Glass, an enterprise run by Rejina (Reji) Thomas, the only black, female, glass engraving/acid-etching artist in the world. Sheer diligence landed Thomas a sub-contract in the twisted, bureaucratic weave of bids to replicate all of the intricate glass work in the Capitol…
Best Place To Get Pricked
Now, here’s a name that truly fits. The caring folks at Community AIDS Resources and Education (C.A.R.E.) offer free, confidential, walk-in HIV tests on Mondays, Tuesdays (8am-7:15pm), and Fridays (8am-4:15pm). They also offer HIV case-management services, drug and alcohol treatment referral, acupuncture detox treatment, and a slew of other caring services.
Most Glamorous Salon
You just can’t get enough of the good stuff at this place – the most happening hair, hair colors, make-up, manicures, and nails. Award-winning stylist Deborah Carter does some of the most famous faces and heads in town; gorgeous daughter Farrah was tapped for Charlie Sexton’s video; Tisa is the Red Sonya of Spurs fans;…
Best Retreat In Oak Hill
Don’t let the cautionary yellow color of the storefront put you off. Inside Hill Country Herbs you’ll find a solid selection of medicinal and culinary plants and extracts, along with products for the body, home, and pets. (Good buys on beeswax candles.) Grab a cup of Red Zinger or espresso and sip it on the…
Something to Talk About
Something to Talk About 1995. Directed by Lasse Hallstrom, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Julia Roberts, Robert Duvall, Gena Rowlands, Kyra Sedgwick, Dennis Quaid, Haley Aull. In this film by Swedish director Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?) , a family is laid bare, warts and all, and made…
Best Choreographer
Not only a skilled dancer and choreographer, Ariel is an artist who pushes herself to new discoveries through interdisciplinary collaborations. Her work with visual artists (like her sculptor son) and composers have added dimensions to Austin dance.
Best Dance Music Club
The place Austinites want to wear their, their, their boogie shoes, just to boogie wit you.
Best Place To Dress Up
Something about the mix of burnished wood and Mediterranean cuisine makes this tapas bar y restaurant seem like more than another Sixth Street haunt. It’s like taking a quick trip to the Continent, and that inspires one to dress apropos. Plus, you never know who you might bump into here.
Best Chips (locally Made)
Heavenly tortilla treats made in our own backyard.
Best Take-out Food
SUB-ordinate? No! SUB-missive? Nix nix! SUB-lime? Oh yes, yes, yes, baby. Give us another shot o’ thundersauce, will ya? Where to bolt when pangs of hunger flash through you like lightning? Duh, and but of course, to the ‘Cloud, where a bevy of yummy Thunderbunnies stand eager to serve you.
Best Toy Store For Kids
The story on this wildly successful chain toy store can be read in its shopping carts: They’re huge. And so is the store and its inventory of playthings, athletic equipment, electronic gizmos, bikes, and so on. Enough stock to send a kid into shock.
Best Public Access TV Show
Wait just one minute… News and information broadcast live from Carver Library with your titillating hosts, Clifton Griffin (big cheese librarian) and Richard Smith (reporter). The first 30 minutes feature state and local issues discussed and reported editorial style; the second part is call-in.
Best Bike Ride
Because you can get there in minutes and feel a million miles away from billboards, traffic, cell-phones, beepers, and cranky co-workers. Lush and lovely.
Best Tennis Courts
Austin’s center court, and returning champ from last year. Lob-lorn readers claim it’s aces.
Best Dry Cleaner
Austin’s most established cleaner and the perennial favorite among our readers.
Best Card/Poster Shop
Outrageous T-shirts, brilliant postcards, and unique gift items that will light up your life.
Most Peaceful Points Of Light
The Virgin stands watch over the offerings – flames from over 150 candles burn at her feet. The tranquil blue and white grotto of San Jose Church in South Austin is a humble, man-made attempt at serenity. If you come to light a candle, take a walk around the parish grounds and enjoy the peace.
Best Concept Bar
This snazzy martini bar serves up more than the traditional gin/vermouth mix, including a purple Chambord martini and the Zilker, a Midori-green concoction garnished with a slice of Granny Smith apple. You’ll feel kind of retro, carrying those big geometric glasses around while the appropriately selected musical accompaniment – big-band jazz, the Sinatra-like crooning of…
Best Twofer Fix
Bolster your before- or aprés-movie visit to the four-screened Village Cinema Art with a caffeine and pastry refueling at either Texpresso or San Francisco Bakery and Cafe. (If cappuccino’s not your thing, other options range from Italian food at either Al Capone’s or Mangia Pizza to Indian delights at Star of India to Chinese at…
Best Exotic Cafe
A swank variation on the neighborhood ice cream parlour, this fashionable Hyde Park gelato and espresso bar is the perfect after-dinner cafe. Dolce Vita offers Italian-style coffees and other imported beverages, desserts, wines, and a large selection of aperitifs including Remy Martin V.S.O.P, Chambord, and Macallan 12-year-old scotch. Treat yourself to a decadent creme brulée…
Best Place To Meet A Dallas Cowboy
Rumor has it that this eatery’s proximity to the Cowboy’s training camp is making it the place to Blue Star gaze. Serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner into the wee hours, Magnolia can apparently satisfy even the biggest appetites. We’re always happy to hang out on the patio – even if Emmitt doesn’t join us at…
Best Shopping Center
You can find styles for miles in this center rich with specialty shops, and if you’ve shopped ’til you’ve dropped, there’s Amy’s Ice Cream to revive your spirits or cinematic delights in the cool Arbor. The center gets extra points this year with the opening of the huge – and enticing – Barnes & Noble…
Best Trekkie Dining Experience
Saturday is “Italian night,” and every few weeks, for reasons unknown, the staff dresses in Star Trek uniforms.
Best Place To Go Fossil-hunting
While many places in Austin provide rich deposits of fossils (near the Shoal Creek bed area, or the roadsides of Loop 360 where they’ve carved away enough rock to unearth many treasures), a relatively unmined area behind The County Line on Bee Caves Road offers a triple whammy: fruitful fossil hunting; a sensational sunset; and…
Best New Statesman Hire
When the Houston Post closed its doors April 19, Capitol Bureau Chief Ken Herman lost a job at which he had become one of the state’s most respected journalists. Herman was hired in the same capacity by the Statesman, a move that renews some faith in the paper’s eventual improvement.
Best Telephone Acronym
We hope it’s true that Hightower can have more long-term impact on policy on the radio than he did in the bureaucracy.
Best Mountain Biking Trail
The hills around Austin have become something of a mecca for the fat-tire biking set. While there are many challenging trails to choose from, our favorite is the loop at City Park about 20 minutes west of town. Most sections are easy enough for novices, but several tough climbs will engage the most experienced experts.…
Best Gandhi Imitation
After watching the United Methodist Church discriminate against gays and lesbians for years without protest, the 60-year old pastor at Austin’s Grace United Methodist Church set out on a two-week hunger strike last spring. Moore started his fast to coincide with an international bishops conference in Austin, hoping to convince church leaders to take a…
Best Aerobics Intsructor
Everyone who works out knows inspiration is key to sticking to it, and Daniel at World Gym inspires us to perspire. Weekly, he hosts four upbeat step classes and two funk/hip-hop dance classes that are so much fun, they hardly feel like exercise. By teaching advanced, motivating steps, his most accelerated students remain challenged while…
Best Place To Get Your G-String Tightened
Walking into Austin Violins’ resin-scented interior, we feel suddenly transported to another time and place. Repairing and revamping stringed instruments is an old-world art and luthier/owner Charles McDavid’s hushed, precise manner sets just the right tone. If you’re leaving your 300-year-old, hand-crafted musical instrument with a stranger, you should feel not just okay but assured,…
Best Backyard
This is our new favorite place to ogle beautifully crafted, pricey outdoor furniture and statuary. In the spring, the exquisite flowering sweet pea vines covering the whole fence make us fantasize about sunny suburban lawns and the income required to landscape them.
Best Retro Kitchen Equipment
We love to browse all the fascinating departments at Callahan’s, but our current favorite has to be their housewares department under the direction of Leora Wilson. If you’re looking for canning equipment, pressure cookers, White Mountain manual or electric ice cream freezers, or one of those contraptions to scrape the kernels off the corn cob,…
Dance Me Outside
Dance Me Outside 1994. Directed by Bruce Mcdonald, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Ryan Black, Adam Beach, Jennifer Podemski, Lisa Lacroix, Michael Greyeyes, Kevin Hicks, Sandrine Holt. Canadian director Bruce McDonald, whose last film was the quirkily entertaining Highway 61, helms this flawed, but likable, comic drama which, despite taking a questionable turn…
Best Comic
The man who’s taken the concept “bad brown biker speed” and turned it into a high (?) art form returns for his 50th consecutive year as Best Comic. Rock Awn, dude.
Best Downtown Club
The place Austinites want to wear their, their, their boogie shoes, just to boogie wit you.
Best Place To Drink Outdoors
Where you can admire a scenic sunset, your libation of preference in hand, from a choice of over a thousand chairs (imagine the agony of Goldilocks in a joint like this!).
Best Chocolates
One hundred and ten years young this year, Lammes is family owned and operated. Even the normally fat-fearing among us cannot resist the chocolate-covered strawberries, cashew critters, chocodillos, and Texas chewy pecan pralines.
Best Tamales
Twenty-four years ago, Rosie started out with two tables and four barstools from her own house. Now, this perennial winner has two restaurants, two to-go stores, and lots of sons and grandkids daily recreating her homemade recipes.
Best Way To Spend A Lazy Afternoon
Make ’em sweat on the playscape, make ’em chill out in Barton Springs, make ’em love learning at the nature center, make ’em laugh cheap with a bag of duck or pigeon feed.
Best Radio Format Change
The froggy has turned into a Prince. What used to be KFGI oldies is now KPTY and what’s known in the biz as “hot adult contemporary.” Like Phil Collins, Bonnie Raitt, Melissa Etheridge, Boyz II Men, and the artist formerly known as….
Best Camping & Outdoor Gear
Shopping for camping equipment make you tents and nervous? Salesfolks here can help. They know the gear.
Best Use Of Natural/Native Landscaping
Last year’s winner too. Well, naturally.
Best Electrician
Fox has 275 eager employees fighting over 150 vehicles for a chance to clean your pipes and get you wired right. And if they snake the U when they should’ve snaked the J, work’s guaranteed for a year. Fowler is the early bird of the field, ready to go as early as 6am.
Best Coffee Store
Need a switch from the same old grind? The folks at Trianon will perk you up with a cup of house-roasted joe, or send you packing with everything you need to do it yourself at home.
Best All-around Poet
There are a number of Austin poets who have the gift of performance, and some who have made it into highbrow literary journals, but it’s difficult for one poet to succeed in both areas. Blue Plate Poet Marlys West, who delivers immaculately crafted, wide-ranging poetry with a honey-stung voice, is the complete package. During her…
Best Gay Tavern With Possibilities
In a town full of what, in polite company, are referred to as “meat markets,” the gay community has too few lazy, casual hangouts. Just last June (1994), our town lost one of the best: Chances. Right next door to the old Chances location is an often-overlooked but cozy little bar. As gracious as the…
Best Vegas Flashback
From the glitz of Vegas she rode, no doubt on a fuchsia Vespa, her voluminous ‘do abso-friggin’-lutely stiff in the wind, the motor’s sputter lost in her lusty version of “It’s Not Unusual.” She’s Margo Lee, and her arrival last year with a kooky cabaret sending up Sixties schmaltz, from Anthony Newley hits to Sinatra…
Best Farm Stand
This really is where the culinary elite meet to greet and eat. Every Wednesday and Saturday, 9am-2pm, you can buy TDA-certified organic produce at the farm where it is grown. Larry Butler and Carol Ann Sayle are the current stewards of this beautiful East Austin property that has been growing vegetables for Austinites for more…
Best Place To Run Into Everyone You Know & Figure Out Who They Took Home Friday Night
Scene-watcher’s alert! You can’t live on gossip alone, so you might as well stuff yourself with some muy bueno, cheap-a-rino breakfast tacos, to boot.
Best Specialty Bookstore
Attention: now in a new location and twice as big. With local writers like Marion Winik and national best-sellers like Hope Edelman giving readings and signings, feminist everything (T-shirts, postcards, and, oh yeah, books), an informative newsletter, and music every third Friday of the month hosted by Diana Jones.
Best Urban Farm
If you’ve enjoyed the summer bounty of fresh, homegrown tomatoes at Kerbey Lane Cafe, then you are acquainted with Austin farmers Cora and Bob Lamar. For years now, the Lamars have been growing produce specifically for the three Kerbey Lane restaurants at their farms in and around Austin. You can’t get any fresher than that.
Best Playground
There’s no bigger place for a kid to play than inside his or her own imagination, and theatre is a great way to get there. Playfest, the Coalition for Children’s Theatre’s annual showcase of works for young people, offers all kinds of plays – musicals, marionettes, storytelling, melodrama – presented by different area companies in…
Best Of Lines; Worst Of Lines
Problem: Modems have pretty much reached their speed limit, and “surfing the Web” from home feels more like trudging through a swamp. Solution: SWB’s DigiLine ISDN service, a blazing-fast set of digital phone lines that will make your modem-shackled friends drool. Caveats: Your wallet will flatten considerably after you shell out for the installation and…
Best Television Feature Reporting
Austin’s a city with a million and one characters – and no one does a better job of seeking them out than KXAN’s Swift. Far from the sterile objectivity to which television traditionally aspires, his reports are both entertaining and passionate, personal and heartfelt. Swift’s the reason many people still switch over for the tail…
Best Outdoor Deal
Offered by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department – for $25 a year, you get free admission to most state parks and invitations to special programs and tours around the state. With most park entrance fees ranging from $4 to $7, it won’t take long to recoup your investment.
Best Legislative Aid
This coalition of local grassroots activists issued daily communiques toward the end of the legislative session, keeping virtually up-to-the-minute tabs on anti-Austin legislation. Unlike the city’s paid lobbyists, these folks earned their slogan, “Going to BAT for Austin.”
Best Alternative Health Care Network
Looking for an option to the HMO? You do have a choice. AHS provides a comprehensive network of alternative health care providers – from acupuncturists and aroma therapists to massage therapists and rolfers – at a 25-40% discount. Membership fees are pretty cheap, at $99 per individual, or $145 for a family, per year, plus…
Best Place To Keep Your Cutting Edge
The fix-it shop that time forgot: musty, oil-stained, cantankerous, and…oops, that’s the owner. Charm aside, this place keeps our aged push mower clicking with good, cheap tuneups and sharpenings. Owners of newfangled machines look happy, too, but we wouldn’t know about that.
Best Bolt Store
You need a bolt? These folks have hundreds of varieties and thousands of sizes to choose from. And we’re not just talking lags, carriage, and hex head. Plop down on the barstools in front of the counter and order your plow bolts or left-handed nuts with the assurance that even your most obscure bolt needs…
Best Rum Selection
We wouldn’t call ourselves rummies, but rum is our especial favorite fermented beverage. Hill’s Super Liquor is where we head when we need to slake our thirst. We gaze in rapt wonderment (really) at the vast array of light, dark, and golden rums. Should we require more information, the incredibly knowledgeable sales staff can give…
Hong Kong Graffiti
Hong Kong Graffiti 1995. Directed by Lo Pan, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Cheng Ka Win, Tai Pic, Lo Pan. This 1995 Hong Kong film kicks off The New Far Eastern Film Series sponsored by the Cinema Differentia Company and the Dobie Theatre. The six-week series is dedicated to showing the latest Asian…
Best Dance Company
The popular bellydancing troupe gets another nod. During the school year, they provide a magic carpet ride to the Middle East with a weekly Thursday night show.
Best Free Entertainment
You can’t beat free weekly tunes on the waterfront for the music-hungry residents of this city. The one thing we can’t figure out is why the bats fly away from the action.
Best Place To Eavesdrop
Always open, always a full house, always a range of River City citizens from all walks, and always, it seems, full of folks who have to spill some serious beans. Oh, the things we’ve heard while stuffing our face with those incomparable pancakes….
Best Coffee (local)
Chiapas grown and Austin roasted – walk within a mile of the main coffeehouse while those beans are cooking and you’ll have a nose-gasm. Available by the cup at such local eateries as Magnolia Cafe and Kerbey Lane, and by the bean at Whole Foods, Wheatsville, Fiesta, and of course at R.M. Coffee House.
Best Baby Presents
Thirty thousand square feet of all things baby-to-six years old. Whether you need something frivolous or practical, chances are you’ll find it here, from toys to apparel to furniture. If you can’t decide, bring a test kid with you to try out anything in the place.
Best Billboard
Reverse psychology which tickled the readers.
Best Radio Show
Considering they don’t just offer insight on all things worldwide, but also add a liberal sprinkling of Austin’s own (such as Marion Winik and John Burnett), we couldn’t agree more with these picks.
Best Day Hike
Because you can get there in minutes and feel a million miles away from billboards, traffic, cell-phones, beepers, and cranky co-workers. Lush and lovely.
Best Volleyball Court
We asked sports expert Andy “Coach” Cotton to explain why this mound of sand and tangle of string beats out the competition every year. After deep thought and inner contemplation he proclaimed, “Well, they have a bar!”
Best Emergency Room
Professional medical care provided with efficiency, precisely what you want in the event of an emergency.
Best Comic Book Store
Sometimes size does count, as in selection. Booksource has the biggest c-book collection in town, featuring the obscure, independents, and plenty of Silver Age books (ones over 25 years old).
Best Billboard Poet
That’s Billboard as in greatest hits, and no matter how many times Jacob Schulze talks about the marriage of Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley, his ex-girlfriend taking a nail file to his tires, or bleeding on newscaster Neal Spelce’s lettuce while fixing his sandwich at Thundercloud, it’s impossible to grow tired of him. Schulze’s…
Biggest Art Mystery
The music is gone for good at La Zona Rosa; the memories remain. But what happened to the art? Whatever became of those tabletops by local art-stars, wall art by the likes of Peter Saul and Ken Hale, Guy Juke, Jim Franklin, not to mention the inimitable and abundant aesthetic contributions of Gordon Fowler? Just…
Best Finger Food
You may have seen these delicious filled pockets in deli cases and in stranger places all over town, but did you know they now have a home of their own? This quaint little downtown restaurant serves lots of goodies you can eat with your hands, including sandwiches, hummus, and those famous empanadas – both fruit…
Best Possibility
Rumors abound that Threadgill’s founder Eddie Wilson is about to close a deal to open Threadgill’s World Headquarters at the former Wyatt’s location on Riverside. That would be mere footsteps from the hallowed ground of another Wilson venture, the legendary Armadillo World Headquarters. See you there.
Best Subculture Store
With a piercing array of hoops and studs for all body parts. And that’s just where the fun starts. Political activism peddled here, as well.
Best Wishes For Another 100 Years
The Faulk, Koock, and Buslett families are very busy at Green Pastures this summer. The venerable Grande Dame of Austin restaurants is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the house and the 50th anniversary of the restaurant in August of 1995. Congratulations!
Best Playscape Renovation
The old playscape had an impressive air of 1960s NASA “can-do” in its space-themed labyrinth of tall spires, cages, narrow slides and fireman’s poles. Just imagine sending your kid up in that thing, however, and not only would you be hepped to how John Glenn’s mom must’ve felt, but also to the reason for the…
Best Phone Book Pages (white)
You’d like to think someone in SWB’s directory division has a potato fetish.
Best TV Anchor
Although the Channel 36 newscast languishes at the bottom of the ratings heap, Hadlock’s performance remains stellar. His no-nonsense approach minimizes the insipid intra-anchor banter that typifies Austin television journalism. And what a relief that is.
Best Place To Let Your Dog Run Free
The small park at the northwest corner of Riverside Drive and I-35 is a leash-free area. The city saved the three-acre corner lot from being developed as a high-rise project in 1983. The fenced-in area around the estates’ old swimming pool is now the best of three leash-free areas in the city (Auditorium Shores and…
Best Mixture Of Politics & Stimulants
After five years of searching, coffeehouse owner Tim Sheehan finally found a way to get Cuban coffee into Austin cups and Havana culture into local hands. Under the supervision of Cubita, Cuba’s national coffee company, an Ecuadorian company grows Cuban coffee plants. The beans are then exported to Texas, with each bag containing a sort…
Best Antiques Picker
If you love olde things but don’t have the time to troll the antique stores for the pieces you desire, or if you know you need something, just not quite sure what – enlist Liz McMahon to find it for you. She’s got great taste, knows the inventory of every hole in the wall from…
Best Place To Rent A Backyard Birthing Tank
Their forebears made a big fuss about rediscovering natural childbirth; now, Baby Boom Mach II puts its characteristic stamp of hyperconvenience on the process. If you use their midwife services and would like a water birth, New Life will rent you an inflatable, five-foot tank, air mattress, and air compressor, and waterbed heater – all…
Best Bookstore Hangout
As if the welcoming attitude of the staff weren’t enough to persuade us that this is one store where it’s cool just to while away the hours, the numerous places to sit in Book People’s spacious new incarnation is a clarion call for lovers of all things literary to drop a load and just hang.…
Best Selection Of First Family Paper Dolls
At least 20 presidential families are represented in this extensive collection. Take home Dick, Pat, and Tricia Nixon and dress them in their elegant selection of togs. Or FDR and Eleanor; Jimmy, Rosalyn, and Amy; the rather lackluster Trumans…. Clotheshorses Ronnie and Nancy rate a book apiece. (Their children are mysteriously absent.) This is also…
Austin Music Network Schedule
Austin CableVision Channel 15 THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 10pm Segway City #4 10:30 Soul Source #3 11pm People’s Picks #23 11:30 Dillo Mix #4 Mid Buzzcocks Live #2 12:30 Leather and Lace 1am Elvis Costello Get Happy/Trust 1:30 Alternative 15 #22 FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 10pm Tex Mix #22 10:30 Rise and Fall of the AWHQ 11pm…
Best Downtown Building (New)
Distinctive on the city skyline and below ground, too. The sunken plaza/park, replete with wall-length fountain and rushing water, is an oasis of serene pleasure in the hustle of downtown. Just bring your lunch, some pennies, and a head full of wishes.
Best Dance Space
An intimate, inviting, open space, given added energy by the ghosts of hundreds of dancers who have leapt and turned and inte-rpreted their way across this much-loved floor.
Best Gay/Lesbian Club
Four out of five friends of Dorothy agree, Oilcan’s is the place to be.
Best Place To Stay Cool
It may be 93 degrees in the shade or 103, but here it’s always 68 degrees in the wet. With a water temperature that never varies, and a chance to swim all year, this could be the one constant in all of our lives.
Best Coffee House
Featuring a zillion coffee choices, including the Best Coffee in town, a cavernous, non-claustrophobic atmosphere, and – get this – no dirty looks for smokers. In fact, you’ll find the Ruta Maya Tobacco Store in the back, with a walk-in Humidor and yummy cigars. Entertainment thrice weekly (Wed/Fri/Sat) and music open mike on Thursdays. Kids…
Best Branch Library
A return winner that offers lots of quality time for the youth of our city.
Best Book By A Local Author
Another return winner. Winik’s wise and witty confessions so captivated Austinites, they had to single it out again. But we bet it’s bumped next year. You see, Marion’s got a new book going to press real soon.
Best Radio Station
Lone Star Justice, serving you some killer homegrown. Easy on the ears without making you feel like you’re on an elevator.
Best Day Trip
Windy and wondrous and trippy recreation, even for drug-free Americans.
Best City Department
Enough cracks about the bicycle squad; Austin Police – on foot, in cars, on motorcycles, on horses, and on mountain bikes – are all over, protecting, serving, and popping wheelies.
Best Fitness Club
Impeccable facility with an abundance of state-of-the-art equipment.
Best Consignment Store
Certainly a title this store will get used to fast. They have so many clothes in stock, they’ve quit taking stuff ’til the fall.
Best Creator Of Site-specific Work / Authority On Bug Spray
Sally Jacques’ performances, tailor-made for such local sites as the Capitol, Laguna Gloria, and Town Lake, qualify her as a pioneer in the area of site-specific work here. A deeply committed political artist who thinks globally and acts locally, Jacques goes to great lengths to stage projects in which Austin’s natural locales and buildings figure…
Best Happy Hour Deal Downtown
Though we are overly fond of the happy-hour tapas spread at Louie’s 106, we are drawn back to Manuel’s time and again for the incredibly cheap deals on their excellent appetizer menu. Recently 15 of us celebrated there, consuming many margaritas and lots of appetizers, spending less than $10 each with a very generous tip!…
Biggest Piano Bar
When the bartender told us that we were sitting in the biggest piano bar in Austin, we asked, “How do you know it’s the biggest?” “Because Donn called up all the other piano bars and asked them how big their piano was,” he replied. “And ours is the biggest.” The staff here is fun, the…
Best Food Mystery
Chron staffers addicted to Flo’s rib-sticking lunches were shocked when they drove up to the site of her serving trailer and found only a vacant slab! But lo and behold! Flo’s is risen with her old favorites in a new location. Pick an entrée and three veggies, plunker down a coupla bucks and have a…
Best Restaurant Fundraising Idea
The Sfuzzi folks raised over $1,000 for the victims of the Oklahoma City bomb tragedy by inviting extremely well-heeled, well-dressed, and well-fed people to blow smoke. What a concept.
Best Thrift Store
It’s K-mart for the tragically hip and/or basically broke. If we ever get married, we’re going to register here.
Best All-Ages Music Venue
Sunday afternoons and rambunctious children go together like sleep-overs and pillow fights, and we all know that the best way to soothe those savage little beasts is to calm them with music. Doing just that every Sunday at the Waterloo Ice House on 38th Street are a handful of performers such as Bob Livingston, who…
Best Rainy Day Hideaway
Our favorite antidote to the 1990s, the Memorial Museum is almost a museum piece itself: dim, cool, hushed, a proper dowager in a world of upstart interactives. The small scale is a plus; even a toddler can do all four floors with aplomb, from basement dinosaurs to glowing gem room. It’s free, or would be…
Best Phone Book Pages (yellow)
While it’s never a waste of time to behold three professional women embracing a skeleton (p. 385), most people don’t realize how truly efficient the Yellow Pages can make you. Have a great idea or a shopping list you want to remember? Simply jot them down on any of the handy “Notes” areas Ma Bell…
Best TV News Reporter
This one’s no contest. Having brought such features as the “Truth Test” to the airwaves (in which the veracity of candidates’ campaign ads are rigorously examined), Channel 24’s Grougan is far and away the best in the city. In fact, his solid reporting is one of the main factors in making KVUE the city’s best…
Best Place To Play Robin Hood
Right in the middle of Austin’s Seventies expanse, plunked right between a spread of ranchstyle houses and the big, modern David Crockett High School, lies the densest cedar elm forest in town. With a fine playscape, public pool, and adjacent Little League fields, Garrison is a veritable Sherwood Forest of hide & seek possibilities.
Best New Map
It’s a beauty: Lots of color and environmental information to let you know just where the heck you are, environmentally speaking.
Best City Library
For the next six months, at least, while the J.H. Faulk Main Library is closed forremodeling, the city has tabbed this branch as the next best thing for research. They’ve moved both the periodicals and reference services here, and if it’s not in the same class as Faulk, at least it’s open (including new 2-6pm…
Best Place To Take A Dip In Your Gene Pool
This is a working genealogical library with census indexes from across the United States, one of the biggest collections of privately printed family histories in Texas, and new CD-ROM data bases containing tens of millions of records. Whether you manage to track down an ancestral rogue of your own or not, just looking at the…
Best Flap Joint
It’s the middle of the night and the toilet is running again… that old flapper. Trek down to this plumber’s hangout for the best selection of toilet flappers. They also have lots of other plumbing parts you may not find at the dis-count home store. Open seven days a week.
Best Selection Of Mexican Imports
There is stiff competition in this category because our hearts belong to Tesoros, El Interior, and Eclectic. But we’ve recently fallen in love with the new, eye-catching building on South Lamar filled with well-chosen folk art, jewelry, glassware, gifts, santos, and retablos from Mexico.
Film Reviews
RECO #48 You scream, I scream: Do we detect a trend in this summer’s movie releases? Since everyone now knows that white men can’t jump, this summer it seems that white men have chosen to prove they can scream. – M.B. stars New Review BULLETPROOF HEARTD: Mark Malone; with Anthony LaPaglia, Mimi Rogers, Matt Craven,…
Best Downtown Building (Old)
This political palace is at the center of Austin, physically and spiritually, its most recognized symbol, the star in the Violet Crown. And the recently completed renovation has taken the Capitol back to its glory days.
Best Library
A great source for print and other information. Alas, by the time this makes print, the main branch will be closed for at least six months for a major renovation. Details of Infotrac and other resources are still up in the air, but the reference numbers will continue to operate and you can find out…
Best Happy Hour Drinks
Maybe it’s the big tree, maybe the seasonal, frosty, yummy margaritas (new this summer, fresh watermelon margaritas; in the fall, ruby grapefruit). Manager Steve says the real reason folks do happy hour at “the place with the sign” is because, “We’re real nice people.”
Best Pool Hall
“Rack ’em, Dan-O.” Over a dozen tables at each location.
Best Custom Cakes
Once, Susan (daughter of Lucy) made a cake in the shape of Bevo and to the tune of 1,200 servings (that had to be hauled away in a truck). Another time, she reproduced, in icing, a photo of a lovemaking couple getting rugburns the best way. Surely, she can accommodate you.
Best Children’s Bookstore (new)
A great source for books for every age from wee-lil-bunny to college-bound. Books from around the world, books that examine all sorts of cultures, books in other languages, plus sidelines like puppets and CD-ROMs.
Best Computer Book Selection
It’s all about numbers. Not just the quantity of available books, but the 10% discount you get for shopping here. Take another 10% if you have a BookStop card. If the salesfolks don’t know what you need, they won’t fool you, they’ll find someone who knows their head from their DOS.
Best Radio Station To Listen To At Work
Lone Star Justice, serving you some killer homegrown. Easy on the ears without making you feel like you’re on an elevator.
Best Golf Course
Situated among the glorious hills west of Austin, this lush and luxurious course mixes spectacular scenery with challenging holes.
Best Community Program
The readers can not bottle their enthusiasm for this environmentally fab program.
Best Florist
No kidding, you can actually buy something here for less than a buck (open roses). With twice-a-day deliveries and a staff that encourages you to take your time browsing in the walk-in fridge, where you can pick just what you want for that perfect nosegay.
Best Costume Shop
Picture yourself in a store, past the riverwith millions of costumes and othergreat buys. (Come on, everybody, hum along, it grows on you.)
Best Hope For A New Museum By The Millennium
The award – this year – goes to the University of Texas Huntington Art Gallery, which has begun to clear the necessary hurdles to begin planning a facility worthy of its current collections and those it could subsequently attract. Lagging behind in the turtle race has been the Austin Museum of Art, which, after presenting…
Best In-your-face Club
Take those musicians off the pedestal. They’re people just like you and me. Now, if we could only tell where the band ends and the audience begins. See, in a place the size of your closet, where there is no elevated stage, the Blue Flamingo defines the phrase “audience participation” since you’re practically in the…
Highest Expression Of The Lowest Form Of Humor
Vowel play rules at this annual battle of wits, a home-groan tribute to verbal abuse held on the grounds of the O. Henry Museum. Aficionados bring picnics; Mr. Porter would’ve packed a flask.
Best Food Scientist
Part chef, part engineer, and part Ph.D. food scientist, local restaurateur Foo Swasdee created one of Austin’s most popular Asian restaurants, Satay, as a test site for her stellar line of Thai sauces and condiments. We are all lucky that she did. While she’s busy testing recipes and developing new markets, we’ll just keep eating…
Best Return To Form
These two classic Austin bakeries are celebrating their respective 20th and 15th anniversaries. This year, both businesses have returned to their former glory with excellent lines of naturally leavened artisan breads. Local bread- and pastry-lovers revel in new flavors and textures served up among the old favorites.
Best Toy Store For Grown-ups
You said it last year, so we will, too: the little Shriners are the best. With lots of cool jewelry, games, puzzles, books, cards, shower curtains, and sundry wacky stuff.
Best Children’s Retail Store
The biggest store devoted to one-stop shopping for kids from infants to six years old. They have clothes, shoes, books, furniture, toys, plus a hair salon and portrait studio. Electronic/educational toys and yard toys (cars, rocking fish, swing sets) are set up so the kids (you) can try before you buy. They have a gift…
Best Winter Birthday Party
When faced with one of the deafening, frenzied, franchised play parks for an indoor birthday party, consider instead a dead-of-winter swim party. The YMCA Southwest Family Branch will rent out a party room and their big, indoor swimming pool complete with lifeguard. Bring in your own cake, decorations, and other party paraphernalia. Your hair will…
Best Place To Hang Ten
While it lacks the sophistication of New York’s @ Cafe, the Incubator is more than cyber-coffee-klatcsh: it’s an immersive experience that combines mochas, micros, murals and music. VR games and nascent multimedia production facilities make a visit to the Incubator quite unlike a trip to the video arcade. Ruta Maya’s new presence promises to up…
Best All-sports Experience
In deference to capitalism, we didn’t call this category “Best Store to Hang Out All Day and Not Buy Anything,” but you get the idea. Participatory try-before-you-buy offerings include a batting cage, dart boards, boxing gear, an archery range, basketball, tennis and racquetball courts, and a ski slope (in season).
Best Public Golf Course
Roy Kizer Golf Course opened last year next to Jimmy Clay Golf Course in Southeast Austin, giving the Austin Parks and Recreation Department their sixth public course, and the city a challenging and environmentally friendly golf course. The course is laid out in European links style, with lots of water hazards that also serve as…
Best Re-Election Campaign
Lately, ex-city councilmember Bob Larson has been looking out for Austin taxpayers with his new group Save Austin From Extravagance (SAFE). Larson wants Austin voters, not the council, to decide whether to spend $10 million in public funds on the new baseball stadium. This spring, the council avoided a lengthy public relations campaign and passed…
Best Cocktail Waitress
We’ve been drunk, we’ve been demanding, we’ve not been model regulars, but Julie has always catered to all our spiritual needs efficiently, and with a big smile.
Best Professional Voice Instruction
A very talented musician and singer in her own right, Mady Kaye is also a much-sought-after vocal instructor. Beginners with career aspirations and professionals who just want to keep their chops in shape are among her legion of satisfied students. Kaye’s main criteria for selecting students is that they share the same delight in singing…
Best Gateway To The Twilight Zone
In the last year, this little bookshop of horrors and space cases has quietly emerged as a premier location for SF, cult, mystery, thrillers – and name authors taking time to make an appearance. In addition to a sometimes macabre sense of humor (they issued a phony announcement that [dead] author Phillip K. Dick was…
Best Spot For Comics By Austin Artists
Austin boasts a veritable Justice Leagueful of fine shops devoted to four-color heroics and black-and-white drama: Big State, Dragon’s Lair, Funny Papers, etc. But for a surreal spin with Sam Hurt’s Eyebeam or a java jolt of Shannon Wheeler’s Too Much Coffee Man, we head to Austin Books. Local artists have their own big rack,…
Music Recommended
Cactus Cafe, Tuesday 8 The last time Charlie Hunter brought his guitar/sax/drums trio to Austin it was for a SXSW that some jazz fans are still talking about two years later. Since then, this San Francisco-based band has signed with prestigious Blue Note Records, and their recent debut, Bing, Bing, Bing!, has met with across-the-board…
Best Place To Hear Poetry
This cavernous café hut provides ample room for budding bards and experienced poets, with space left over for your friends to cheer you on. Spoken word open mike every Sunday – sign up at 7:30pm.
Best Happy Hour Entertainment
You got Toni Price Tuesdays, 8 1/2 Souvenirs Wednesdays, Don Walser and Asylum Street Spankers alternating Thursdays, The Blues Specialists Fridays. Plus, no cover. Get it?
Best Rock Dancing
Rock (at) the ‘boat baby. For those who prefer Ian Moore than they prefer disco.
Best Greasy Spoon
Kum-bak to the fry and dine, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Not food for the faint of arteries, this beloved, longtime North Campus eatery is the place to go for an OT (that’s a double bacon cheeseburger), a DH (that’s a patty melt), or a top sirloin sandwich with fries (that’s a top sirloin sandwich with…
Best Children’s Bookstore (used)
Plenty of previously owned, housebroken, good-with-children favorites and an impressive array of not-used, only-slightly-less-than-new, quality editions.
Best Computer Repair
The home grown success story continues, helping with those sudden Window pains.
Best Radio Talk Show Host
Blumberg’s not just another pretty mouth, and he applies his once-a-city-hall-reporter-always-a-city-hall-reporter attitude with both knowledge and objectivity.
Best Native Plant Nursery
One happy shopper says, “The most knowledgable plant babe in town works here.” Two green thumbs up to a perennial winner.
Best Councilmember
The mustachioed man takes the prize again. This petal pushin’ politician continues to prove hippies count. Flower Power to the People!
Best Hair Salon
A return winner, this salon is the highlight in the life of our readers dye-ing for a derring-do.
Best Gift Shop
They may not be in Clarksville anymore, but they still boast the same fine selection of pots, chimes, kaleidescopes, and wooden boxes they always have. Don’t forget to hit the gongs outside the Central Park location.
Best Implemented City Art Proposal / Work
In 1995, the collaborative ironwork gate to the Zilker Garden Center proposed and constructed by Lars Stanley and Louis Herrera wins, hands-down, as the finest functional site-specific contribution to the Austin landscape.
Making The Best Of A Bad Situation
We salute this group of mega-talented vocalists who must ply their trade in the worst acoustical situation in the city – Ancho’s Restaurant in the lobby of the Omni hotel. Imagine singing opera from the bottom of the Grand Canyon four shows a week and you’ve just about got it.
Best Kept Secret
We wonder if filmmaker Richard Rodriguez envisioned this joint when he was shooting El Mariachi. You can rent your choice of Spanish-language videos and then belly up to the counter for some of the best comida casera (home cookin’) on the Eastside. Try the soft, homemade gorditas stuffed with carne guisada and a fresh cantaloupe…
Best Lingerie Shop
The secret is out: This is the popular source for outfits to put some spice in your nightlife.
Best Used Book Store
In a town full of the over-educated and under-employed, and with the main branch library shutting down for at least six months, let us now praise famously low prices on barely driven texts. Amen.
Best Dmz
Before the advent of this Austin non-profit agency, the exchange of children between unamicably divorced parents could be a terrifying minefield, ready to explode at any time. And the kids were the casualties. The Kids Exchange offers a neutral, non-threatening location for those exchanges, as well as a child-friendly site for supervised or controlled visitation.
Best Cable Access TV Show
“Lenny” is an opera singer. He demonstrates his technique for the home viewing audience one evening: He takes a clear plastic tube and sticks it into his nose, pushing it down until one end comes out through his mouth. Then, tube hanging from his face, Lenny (in reality performance artist Linda Montano) commences to sing…
Best Post-game Camera Hog
Who got the closest to Houston’s Akeem Olajuwon in the NBA Finals? That would be local developer and minority-share Rocket owner Gary Bradley, who glued himself to the Dream’s armpit throughout the celebration of the deciding fourth game and thus insured his 15 minutes of national television fame. If only David Robinson had done half…
Best Barton Creek Put-in If You Have An Old Dog
Smooth grades, fast access to the water, and soft dirt paths make this shady trip ideal for dogs who still care to swim but can’t or won’t walk very far.
Best Social Climbing
Okay, so maybe you’re not Grizzly Adams. Sure you like the outdoors, but it’s nice to think you could meet a prospective buddy on your not-so-grizzly adventures. Enter Reimer’s Ranch. Plenty of nice climbing routes along with nice swimming and a barrel of other nice folks just like you! All this for two measly bucks.…
Best Reason To Carry A Gun At The Capitol
The mild-mannered Pogue simply tried to take a photo of the former legislator. But she’d have nothing of it, grabbed Pogue’s camera and threatened to scream. And you thought only bigshots needed bodyguards.
Best Electronic Repair
Mr. Wizard’s has never been nor acted like a chain store; instead, they repair electronic equipment at very reasonable rates, search the world for that particular stylus you need for your antiquated turntable, sell abandoned, repaired equipment, and cheerfully refund your money if it doesn’t work out. They’ll talk shop if you want and not…
Best Reason To Stand Up Straight
We know there are many valuable chiropractors in town, but our guy keeps us in line at a price we can afford. Dr. Schneider’s healing hands can untie a muscle knot in minutes, feel out what’s causing that persistent back pain, or alleviate the pressure of a sinus headache on the spot. If your ailment…
Best Inexpensive Used Furniture
Whether you’re hunting hardwood furniture or a period piece (we’re thinking Seventies), you’ll want to stop by Hur’s. Open a scant five hours a day, they offer the unusual, the beautiful, and the bizarre – all unbelievably cheap! (So cheap we hesitate to recommend lest all our lusted-after treasures are sold before we can purchase…
Best Tread Trade-in
If your sneakers just aren’t going that extra mile, jog down to Run-Tex for a replacement. They have a huge selection of running shoes at prices comparable to the big sporting good stores, and a staff who knows their specialty inside and out. Leave your old shoes behind and you’ll get $10 off the new…
Road Shows
AUGUST FRI 4 Todd Rundgren, Liberty Lunch FRI 4 Bobgoblin, Electric Lounge FRI 4 Ritual Device, 713 Reverse, Emo’s SAT 5 Dokken, Back Room SAT 5 Space Streakings, Mount Shasta, Emo’s SAT 5 Sebastian Whittaker, Symphony Square SAT 5 Mojo Nixon & Swaggert, Continental Club SAT 5 Home, August Suns, Rugburns, Electric Lounge SAT 5…
Best Hotel/Motel
With its broad staircase, soothing piano bar, fab bronze cowboy sculpture, elegant 19th-century style, and its own ghost, you’ll want to check in for a night even if you live in town.
Best Theatre Actor
Warm, witty, and now totally Tony (following a Best Actor nomination for A Tuna Christmas on Broadway), this consummate comic actor is someone we never tire of seeing.
Best Happy Hour Food
Not just another bin of chicken nuggets, folks. This place offers substantial cocktail cuisine.
Best Teen Scene/Hangout
Take your pick: Northcross, Highland, Barton Creek Square, Westgate, each and every one is a modern Pied Piper drawing various and sundry teens from every walk to check out the game scene, the fashions, and each other.
Best Grocery Store
What we like is that many of the products feature labels with pictures of people (e.g.: Frank Sinatra spag sauce). What you’ll like is that these folks aren’t kidding when they say “wide variety” – for instance, 150 brands of mustard. And don’t get us started on the fabulous produce department.
Best Children’s Clothing
The store itself is in infancy – open now only nine months. Long enough for our readers to gestate a great fondness for the mostly cotton offerings in sizes to fit kids from floppy-headed newborns to fidgety five-year-olds.
Best Computer Store
Whether you’re techno-literate or a Net naïf, this store can serve your online needs. It’s the Central Market of hard-drives, surge protect-ors, mousemats, and all sorts of stuff.
Best Sportscaster
The man with the plays is the readers’ fave.
Best Neighborhood Park
Endless entertainment value, from Barton Springs to the fire truck on the new playscape to the soccer fields to the choo-choo to the Nature Center to the broad kite-flying spaces.
Best Effort To Control Pollution/Improve The Environment
More than an ABBA hit, this grassroots gang is willing to keep at it as long as the enemy keeps Jim-bob-bobbing along.
Best Kennel/Vet
They promise to treat your kitty like it’s their kitty, about the most comforting thing a pet owner can hear.
Best Hardware Store
Readers concur: variety breeds consent. Full spectrum fun, with aisles filled with everything from the practical to the practically impossible to find elsewhere.
Best Lighting Design On A Shoe String
A shoe string, a piece of wire, a tin can, a flashlight – Jason Amato can make very cool light effects with most anything. A versatile designer who’s lit everything from the Zilker Musical to the avant garde BodyMind, Amato excels when working for alternative artists with tiny budgets. We were especially taken with his…
Best New Bar
With wide open spaces and lounging areas reminiscent of the old Cannibal Club but better, Casino el Camino is really too laid back for its Sixth Street locale. The bar has more comfortable seats and couches than any we’ve ever frequented, pool tables, a great CD jukebox, and a really cool open-air back patio complete…
Most Friendly Poetry Slam
As oxymoronic as that sounds, Garland Thompson’s monthly Shootout at the Planet Theatre is more of a community gathering than a flat-out competition. Judging is done by hidden ballot, and Thompson’s gregarious, generous emcee style gives the event an undeniable and heartening positivity. When poet/actor Zell Miller edged Wammo in a recent slam, Wammo was…
Best Kolaches
Though not technically in Austin, Blue Ribbon’s ethereal pillows of yeast dough, with fillings made from scratch, are worth the short, scenic drive to the nearby Caldwell County hamlet of Prairie Lea. The sign above the small white frame building says “Your wife called and said to bring home Kolaches.” There you have it.
Best Liquor Store
An engaging selection of fine spirits, with ambience straight up.
Best Vintage Clothing
Hot fresh java upstairs, cool old threads downstairs.
Best Dollar Movie House For Kids
Actually, this place is for the whole family. Recent releases, good seats, and great prices bring a family movie outing into the realm of possibility, which, these days, is no mean feat. And, when a whole family walked out of the Goofy movie not long ago, the management cheerfully offered a refund or an alternate…
Best Comeback
Coleman was riding high as KXAN-Channel 36 Sports Director until his arrest on drug charges during an undercover prostitution sting. A career-ending setback? No way. This summer, after a brief stint in rehab, the former college football player reemerged as general manager of the East Austin community radio station KAZI-FM.
Best Proof That Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free
Microcomputers have been around for over 20 years. E-mail has become an integral part of corporate life. Real electronic commerce – and jobs – are right around the corner. If you haven’t got a computer or a network connection, however, you lose. Building public network access ain’t cheap: It’s a task that has entangled both…
Best Baseball Park
Sure, the new minor league stadium on the east side of town that will cost the city millions in construction dollars may be nice. But for my money, it won’t be able to beat the low-tech home of the Concordia Stags. Beautiful green grass, a couple of bleachers not more than 15 yards from home…
Best Sports Ambassador
Casual fans probably aren’t too impressed with Armstrong’s 36th-place finish in the recent Tour de France. But then, overall placement isn’t everything in the grueling, three-week championat. Armstrong accomplished his top two goals – finishing the race for the first time, and winning a stage – and he won over a ton of fans with…
Best Reason To Take A Hike
A coalition of 25 organizations and governmental agencies, the AMTC has been working for more than two years to coordinate a trail system in the Austin area. The group won nearly $7 million in federal and local funds for trail construction and maintenance in 1994, and is pushing for a $20-25 million bond package to…
Best Environmentally Friendly Printing Company
We are very impressed with the work of this inventive printer located in what we think of as the Manor Road Rennaissance Area. The knowledgeable, helpful professional staff produces creative work on recycled paper with earth-friendly soy inks. You may be familiar with their stuff if you’ve been shopping at Whole Foods lately; Kestrel designed…
Best Spa
Just the kind of spa you’d expect to find in Austin. Situated in a perfectly serene spot – just 20 minutes outside of town where Lake Austin abuts a hill country “mountain,” across from the old Bohls Ranch – the place has terrific spa “activities” and some of the best food in the city, much…
Best Late-Night Piñataria
Behind the large, colorful sign lies a small, mysterious building packed with both strange and traditional (current cartoon/pop culture icons) papier mâché creations. Sure, they have stated opening and closing hours; however, every time we’ve called, an extremely friendly gentleman assures us that he can wait for us – what time could we be there?…
Best Urban Music Selection
What was once a small, but chock-full, record collector’s hideaway in the old Delwood Plaza has exploded into a contender for the local retail market. The store grew along with the strip mall’s expansion and seems to have found its funky niche in keeping a supply to meet the demand for urban, rap, hip-hop, and…
Film: Showtimes
Showtimes listed below start Friday, August 4 and cover the week ending Thursday, August 10. *An asterisk (*) before a title means that no passes or special admission discounts (apart from matinee discounts) will be accepted for any screening. *Parentheses indicate weekend showtimes for Saturdays and Sundays only, unless otherwise noted. *Changes may sometimes occur,…
Best Indoor Mall
Even transplanted Jersey girls – chicks who know their malls – agree: Highland is buy-land, a shopper’s paradise where, in about an hour or less, you can exponentially expand every aspect of your life while waiting for those new glasses to be ground so you can better see the great stuff you bought.
Best Theatre Actress
Motherhood has not slowed but rather enhanced her act, as the divine (or is that diving?) Ms. Sedwick sweeps the actress category once again.
Best Inexpensive Date
Better than a sonnet. Cheaper than a bottle of wine. Quicker to get to than the ocean. Want to win somebody’s heart? Take them here to see a sunset; you won’t have to say a word.
Best Tejano/Conjunto Club
Featuring hot Tejano tunes and cheap, cheap drink specials (Would you believe buck beers and buck margaritas?).
Best Lunch Under $5
Border-ing on broke? Worried if you turn your car off it won’t start again? If you answered yes and are hungry, to boot, it’s time to make a run for the faux-stucco drive-thru near you.
Best Children’s Entertainer
His smile is Pepsodent perfect, his sense of enthusiasm is cheerleader chipper, and he has the energy of, well, a 10-year-old. Which makes Andy Ehrenfeld a great one for giving youngsters a show biz spectacular good time.
Best Evening Radio
Like the Harper’s magazine of radio – a collage of all sorts of goodies from Car Talk to Selected Shorts to Public Forum to that weird and wonderful deejay, Mr. Phil Musik.
Best Sportswriter
Cotton’s pickings, whether he’s hawking hoops or talking titty bars, are always worth a look. One of our own and never without insight on everything from women to bowling balls to nosebleeds.
Best Overall Nursery
This place is fertile ground for those who want to rake in the rewards of a lovely landscape.
Best Local Eccentric
Something about flowers (one twirls ’em, the other sells ’em) must lead readers to leaf any other contenders in the dust for this category.
Best Laundromat
The former provides the no-frills, get-those-clothes-clean-and-get-going laundry experience while the latter offers the build-a-better-butt-whilst–waiting-for-the-dryer-to-stop approach.
Best Jewelry (Costume)
Once again beading the competition.
Best Logo Redesign / Optical Illusion
The old logo for Rise was a lengthwise rectangle showing Charles Manson’s eerie eyes. Upon famous artist guy Frank Kozik’s departure from Rise Records, the label – in a blast of insane genius – redesigned the Kozik logo. Like some of Salvador Dali’s more popular works, if you squint you can see something that’s not…
Best Obscure Bar
After seven years as a private club, new ownership has opened this tucked-away watering hole to the public. The beer is cold, the shuffleboard fast, and the sunset view over nearby Austin Zoo is spectacular. On a recent visit, we had the dart board, shuffleboard, domino table, and patio all to ourselves. The crowds haven’t…
Next Best Thing To Having Don Walser At Your House
Tuesdays, from 8-10pm, out on their back patio, under the shady oak trees and army netting, Jovita’s offers the best in Austin music. The yodeling Pavarotti of the Plains, Don Walser and the Pure Texas Band are just that – pure Texas. Be sure to tip your waitresses – if you can catch them. And…
Best Little Pho House In Texas
The cozy Vietnamese place at Koenig and Lamar not only slings a mean noodle, it also offers a number of cheap frills. Treat yourself to an iced French roast coffee with sweetened condensed milk, a fat shrimp spring roll, or an ice-cold Snowflake, China’s best export beer.
Best Lumber
Our resident building expert, Suzy Banks, says this place has a good selection of multi-dimensional wood that moves fast and hence is always fresh and straight. Extra bonus: Collins Wood is available here exclusively. And what is Collins Wood? Ah, it’s from a certified sustainable forest. Wooden you know it?
Best Western Wear Store
With a mooooo-velous selection of cow-clothes for chaps and chicks, it’s plains to see why Shepler’s again rustled up the most votes.
Best Educational Curriculum
Teacher Carla Marshall longed for a classroom without walls and so she created the Green Classroom, an organic gardening project at South Austin’s Becker Elementary. The presidential award-winning project offers elementary school children a completely integrated learning situation that reinforces all their work in regular classes and builds self-esteem in the process. The kids learn…
Best Example Of What The Net Is About
It’s a comic book series! No, wait, it’s an Internet service provider! Actually, it’s both. There’s no better proof of a micropublishing revolution in the works than at Eden Matrix. A bunch of guys who started publishing comics for small, devoted groups of fans have built a business where they sell low-cost, unmetered Internet connections…
Best Reason To Mix A Batch Of Early Morning Martinis Or Best Early Morning Hangover Remedy
Some of us never really hated our parents’ music. Some of us secretly reveled in those snappy, pappy tunes by the likes of Ferrente & Teicher, 101 Strings, Sergio Mendez & Brasil 66. Jay Robillard forces the smoking jacket out of the closet and serves up a swizzling mix of easy-going (not EZ Listening) tunes.…
Best Basketball Court
Hardly a day passes when you can’t find top-notch action at this West Austin slab. Players are skilled and the games are rough – this is the place to show off your game, not discover it. But Enfield’s best asset is its sense of community. Despite occasional pushing and shoving, cooler heads generally prevail as…
Best Year-round 64degree Dip Without Getting Wet
While it can’t boast a big, color-light show or eerie mood music like some of our nearby commercial caverns, Longhorn is the king of them all. A long-ago outlaw hideaway and Confederate gunpowder keg, this treasure was unearthed of its Freetail pals and turned into a public attraction in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation…
Best Reason To Write Austin Rep. Lloyd Doggett
Congressional conservatives are threatening to do away entirely with funding for this private, national program that offers legal aid to poor people. The Central Texas office alone helped 10,000 people last year, turning another 3,000 away due to lack of resources.
Best Family Lawyer
If only he had an “I” for a middle initial, we’d name a drink after him and raise our glasses in toast to his down-to-earth, cut-to-the-chase, forget-the-legalese-jargon tactics. Esquire Berger: He’s smart, he’s funny, and for once you’ll beg someone not to get off your case, but to please, please, get on it.
Best Swing Dance Lessons
Thursdays at 9:30pm at the Black Cat on Sixth Street, instructors Matt Jones, Susy Hovis, Darby O’Shieles, and Peter Turner give two-stepping and Texas swing lessons to the rest of us clod-footed wannabees. We’re grateful and they’re gentle. Dale Watson takes the stage at 10:30pm so you can practice what you’ve learned. $6 gets you…
Best Little Shop Of Tiles
Ever wonder what was in that building on Fifth Street – the one with the cool sunflower tile mosaic on the west wall? Answer: Tiles and plenty of ’em. Resident artiste Elena Eldelberg gets all fired up over creating made-to-order and one-of-a-kind tile designs and murals for all y’all who are tired of duck stencils.
Best Used Cookbook Selection
On a daily basis, you can’t beat these folks with their large selection of used cookbooks and back issues of all the major food magazines. Considering the astronomical retail price of cookbooks these days, it pays to check the shelves regularly if there is a title you just can’t live without.
Clean, Shaven
Clean, Shaven 1994, NR, 79 min. Directed by Lodge Kerrigan, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Peter Greene, Robert Albert, Megan Owen, Molly Castelloe, Jennifer Mcdonald. (This is a reprint of the Austin Chronicle review that ran in March when this film premiered in Austin at the SXSW Film Festival.) The low-frequency radio transmissions…
Best Landscaping
How big is this place anyway? And how do they keep it as green as Ireland despite the heat, and as trimmed and perky as Jack La Lanne despite the constant foot traffic? We don’t know, but we sure do dig it.
Best Theatre Company
Less than a year old, this comedy troupe with (among others) Marc and Laura Pruter, Greg Dorshak, Eric and Scott Perry, and Christy Ingram, has already won a following for their mix of improv and sketches. Check out their weekly gigs at the Velveeta Room to learn about Sam Spade’s lingerie and Justice Man!
Best Jukebox
A call to management, asking for a description of said box, netted this response: “It’s pretty broad-range. Like our crowd.” Featuring the likes of Ol’ Blue Eyes, S.R. Vaughan, Tom Petty, Muddy Waters, and a bazillion others.
Best Video Store (chain)
When you absolutely, positively have to see that brand-new video release tonight (the one thousands of other video-mad Austinites want to rent tonight, too), the ‘Buster will provide. They have more copies of popular releases than god, probably. And there’s one nearby.
Best Open-Air Market
Countless vendors offering all sorts of fresh Texas produce in an open air market. And while you’re perusing the perishables, you can stop at one of several restaurants offering BBQ, gourmet, and, of course, vegetarian fare. Don’t miss the annual peach, pumpkin, and hot sauce festivals.
Best Children’s Musician
Aloha-Joe-ha, he of the tacky shirts and many albums and videos, has been performing since 1984, cranking out kiddie hits like: “Goo-Goo, Ga-Ga,” “Bahamas Pajamas,” and “Deep in the Jungle.” While he lives here, he doesn’t play here much; he’s much in demand on the national tour circuit. But he is coming home to the…
Best Internet Provider
Near free for students and staff, it’s every poor student’s dream connection to the wide world of web.
Best Syndicated Columnist
Well, Molly done did it again. The politically provocative penster gives syndicated heck to peeved perusers and protects pansy proponents planetwide.
Best Participatory Sport
We ask a loaded question and this is the best you can give us?
Best Local Scandal
Rich with twilight-zoning loopholes, Circle “C”itizens turn water regulations into whine.
Best Photo Lab
The lab that gets you those important images quickly, economically, and conveniently.
Best Jewelry (Fine)
With sterling prices starting under five bucks and diamond deals of which most of us can only dream. The lack of pretension here is the crowning jewel.
Best Name To See In A Theatre Program
In Austin, actors and stage companies are like witches in Oz: They come and go so quickly. Which can leave veteran play-goers poring over a program with no clue as to what kind of dramatic journey awaits. But one name always signals a rich perform-ance ahead: Lana Dieterich. For over a decade, Dieterich has graced…
Best Pair Of Aged Intoxicants
The historic Paramount’s revivals of vintage film classics is sweetened by the sale of beer, wine, and spirits at the concession counter.
Sweetest Door Folks
Steamboat’s doorman David Cotton might be the nicest in the business, but even when he has a replacement working the door, you know you’re dealing with a kind, courteous pro. Sure, they hawk their low cover and beer specials like all the other obstreperous shillers on Sixth Street, but the inviting demeanor of these doordudes…
Best Mainline To White Sugar OD
Traveling? Prepare yourself. Pink Cake is not available everywhere. Sure, New York has better bagels, but where’s the Pink Cake??? And we’ll wager that the pizza they brag about in Chicago is tastier, but bet they don’t have Pink Cake. Granted, Seattle did the coffee-house thing before we did… but do they have Pink Cake?…
Best Music Business
For tunesters of any stripe or experience, Strait will set you up with the sheets, picks, strings, and instruments you require.
Best Acoustics
Considering it was once just another cavernous warehouse often mistaken for the real “Bat Cave,” the Austin Music Hall’s transformation into a state-of-the-art live music venue has been astonishing. Now one of Austin’s larger music halls (accomodating between 2,500 and 3,000 people), the AMH not only offers a great view from nearly any seat, it…
Best Excuse To Play Dress-Up
No princess ever really needs an excuse to dress-up, but the Elisabet Ney Museum seems to always have one at the ready. Nestled in a tiny, wooded kingdom in Hyde Park, this castle has played host to parties fit for kings and princesses of all ages. Their summer series of children’s hours has come to…
Best Job In Town
Your CEO biennially turns his estate into a haunted house complete with hydraulics, Tesla coil, moat, and a bitchin’ fireball device. The company team has won prizes for floating elaborate pirate ships, dragons, and steam trains down Town Lake. And you build some of the best-selling computer games – a fascinating craft merging graphics, sound…
Best Reason To Tape Seinfeld & Watch It Later
The name of their weekly call-in program is stupid and redundant since it’s also the name of the already-established Daily Texan column. Corky mutters that he wants to change it to Everybody’s a Critic, which sounds like a good idea. Still, we hear too many people griping about music critics and their opinions in print;…
Best Batting Cages
Step up to the plate at one of the Pleasant Valley Sportplex’s four batting cages (slow-pitch softball). They’re open in the evenings from 4:30-10:30pm, and with 15 pitches costing a mere 50cents, there’s no cheaper way to swing. Batter up!
Most Creative Use For A Boy Scout Post
Sprung up from city anti-skate laws, the Liberty Skatepark provides a whole slew of legal skate fun. Adopted as a Boy Scout Explorer Post to justify city land use and community presence, it’s packed to the hilt with steep ramps and today’s hottest skate fashions. Who says the Boy Scouts are for squares?
Best Seat In The House
Located at the far left of the city council dais.
Best Garage
No franchise feeling here. It’s the kind of garage that reminds us of when we were kids and dad took us in the Buick down to the local gas station for a sodey pop and a tune-up. (Note: The only gas here, though, is that swapped amongst the workers and patrons.) Friendly, patient guys like…
Best Trend In Physical Rehab
Now, here’s a concept… This facility happily houses medical doctors, physical therapists, and chiropractors all under the same roof. Convenience is not often a word used in describing medical services, but it’s nice to know that the folks at Southwest Medical will integrate traditional, pharmacological, and holistic practices to heal what ails you.
Best Natural Pet Care
Connie Moore really is a local treasure. Her informative newsletter and encyclopedic knowledge of culinary, medicinal, and cosmetic herbs are invaluable resources for everyone who happens into this quaint stone shop in South Austin. Check out the current issue of her newsletter for the straight dope about PROGRAM before you give it to your pets,…
Best Comeback
Things looked grim for the APD after last February’s Cedar Avenue incident, when a routine police call turned into what many termed a “police riot.” But the APD seems to have taken seriously community concerns about the lack of minority officers and is changing its recruiting policy. Starting this summer, cadets wait until after they…
Bulletproof Heart
Bulletproof Heart 1994, R, 95 min. Directed by Mark Malone, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Anthony Lapaglia, Mimi Rogers, Matt Craven, Peter Boyle, Monika Schnarre, Joseph Maher. Director Mark Malone makes an impressive debut with this modern film noir about a hit man who falls in love with his victim. This cold-blooded drama…
Best Motel
All post-prom and no-place to go? Westlake attitude, South Austin budget? Want the in-laws closer than Oklahoma but further than the pull-out sofa? Call Mo-Six for a quick fix.
Best Theatre Space
The Paramount is simply “the grande dame of Austin theatres.” You feel rich sitting in the audience. Zach Scott offers a pair of flexible spaces, which are used to better and better effect every season.
Best Margaritas
We asked employee/lit major/transplanted New Jersey guy Ethan Z. exactly why Baby A’s keeps winning this category. Ethan says, “Well, the margaritas are pretty strong, there are about a million flavors, you can mix and match them to your heart’s content, and Hunter S. Thompson and Ernest Hemingway would both approve of them.” Thanks, Ethan.
Best Video Store (specialty)
Craig “the big fuzzy guy” Pankey has managed to please our video-savvy readers once again. Whether your tastes run to classic, modern, foreign, or cult, Vulcan has a huge selection to suit you. The place to check for Japanimation or those wild Hong Kong action titles.
Best Oriental Bowl Of Noodles
More – oh so much more – than a souped up version of your ramen-staple diet. Grab a big, big bowl o’ noodles from a very, very friendly waiter for less than $5.
Best Children’s Resale Clothing
Small store, big selection, beginning with fetal wear (read: maternity clothes) and sprouting up to the pre-teen range. If you have kids’ clothes your kid doesn’t fit into any more, they have a consignment for you, angel.
Best Late Night Deejay
Hey, Johnny W., make ours a double! Perhaps loved as much for his show as for the fact he’s a real guy-about-town, not just some voice in a box.
Best TV Anchor Person
Maggio is no stranger to this winning slot, nor is she a stranger to the city. A mainstay with a clear view of the beat.
Best Place To Get Married
A bloomin’ brilliant idea. No wonder this locale keeps winning.
Best Public Servant
Hizzoner gets the nod. Although he doesn’t always secure the consensus for which he strives, Todd isn’t afraid to get in the thick of the major issues facing this city, frequently on thorny subjects that a more squeamish politico might well avoid.
Best Plumber
Fox has 275 eager employees fighting over 150 vehicles for a chance to clean your pipes and get you wired right. And if they snake the U when they should’ve snaked the J, work’s guaranteed for a year. Fowler is the early bird of the field, ready to go as early as 6am.
Best Place To Take A Landscaper To Lunch
It’s only a few months old, but the architecture at the center already reeks of history. The stone, corkscrew observation tower, the man-made spring bubbling in the middle of the courtyard, the fortress-like rock fences, the corrugated metal barns, and the mysterious aqueduct create the illusion of an ancient settlement that underwent many changes over…
Best New Dance Company
One of the best-kept secrets in town, this young troupe offers Spanish dance with flair. Based on South Congress but doing much of its work on the road – via the Texas Commission on the Arts’ touring program – Sylviana has quietly made a name around the state for its excellence in performance. During José…
Best Place To Find A Girlfriend
You’re into sports; she’s into sports. These events are true magnets for hearty mamas – thousands of them. So, forget the bar scene, grab your big orange foam finger, brush up on your verses to “Texas Fight” and you, too, will be a lodestone of love.
Best Authentic Cantonese
With the opening of our newest, non-buffet, Cantonese restaurant, Austinites can now experience Chinatown cuisine without having to travel to southwest Houston. Rainbow’s weekend Dim Sum brunch mixes traditional Cantonese – Roast Duck with Plum Sauce, Shu Mai, Fresh Shrimp Cheung-fun, Duck or Chicken Feet, Rice Congee with 1,000-year-old eggs, Snowballs, etc. – with nouveau…
Best Neighborhood Grocery
There are many things to love about the Green & White: the ambiance, the delicious tamales, the lucky candles. But where else in town can you buy a giant bottle of La Vencedora brand Mexican vanilla without coumarin or preservatives? It’s the most wonderful vanilla flavor we’ve ever tasted.
Best Pawn Shop
Seems this chain never takes a vacation from our reader’s hearts.
Best Addition To The Avenue
As home to our finest civic building, the Capitol, and to several institutions which define Austin, from St. Edward’s University to the Paramount Theatre to those wacky bats under the bridge, Congress Avenue has a special character and needs restaurants, shops, and landmarks which reflect that character and keep the street alive. The best recent…
Best Free Family Entertainment
We dropped in one early summer evening to hear the Mady Kaye Trio and found the deck and surrounding lawn populated with young families with kids. This is a great idea if you want to eat affordably to the sound of good music, you can’t spring for a babysitter, and you need to take your…
Best Line On An EE’s Resume
Ever since the Apple-IBM-Motorola triumvirate began its quest to dethrone Intel as king of microprocessors, this design facility in the Northwest hills has quietly become home to some of the best electronics engineers in the country. It’s still unclear if the fruits of their labor – the super-fast, superscalar PowerPC line – is the Holy…
Best Reportage
It’s been said nostalgically that World War II was “the last good war.” That’s not the way it has come across in Glover’s column over the past few years. With his “50 years ago this week” format, a matter-of-fact, present-tense prose style, and liberal quotations from first-hand accounts, news reports, and primary historians, Glover has…
Best Camping Spot
In order to make the list as best camping spot, a park would have to have swimming, showers, water, and electricity at the campsites, be an hour or less from Austin, and have beautiful scenery. No place fills the bill better than the former cattle ranch now called Pedernales Falls State Park.
Best Advice
On her way out of office, Richards marked a Bible passage for the newly inaugurated Gov. George W. Bush: “Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate; it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.”
Best State Accomplishment
The brainchild of Rep. Ted Kamel and Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos, the new agency will allow citizens to pre-purchase tuition at state universities, thereby allowing parents to save money for college and lock in lower tuition rates.
Best Motorcycle Service
If you’re a veteran motorcycle rider you know how difficult and painful it can be to release your precision machine to an untried mechanic. No worries with Kasson’s crew of seasoned professionals. They’ve been keeping Austin bikers happy for 20 years. They fix what they say they’ll fix, and return your bike on time… clean!…
Best Vocal Aerobics
You’re in a nightclub with a group of people equally as nervous as you. Everyone makes a big circle and you are directed to snap your fingers to the music – and begin scatting. Yes, scatting. You look around. People are actually doing it. You part your lips. A slight “Bah-buh-dee-bop” eases itself out. You…
Best Old-fashioned Feed Store
When Buck Moore opened in an old grocery building 23 years ago, Lamar was known as the Dallas Highway. A drive-in theater sat on the corner of Lamar and Koenig Lane, the Stallion Drive-in across the street sold the best chicken-fried steaks in town, and the Buck Moore Feed Store served mostly farmers and ranchers.…
Best of Austin 1995
Introduction Each year, the Chronicle’s Best of Austin issue highlights many of the things that make us want to inhabit our fair city; to be neighbors in a diverse community,to raise our families here, to support the local economy, and to protect the environment. This time around, we continued the tradition of giving our readers…
