Neiner's Beer Garden Diary

What?  A bakery can’t be a beer garden! Whoa whoa, easy tiger…

One Man’s Experience

From their website:

Slow down, stay awhile.

Driving into Austin, I have my GPS set on a beer garden named “Scholz Garden.” It leads me through the city into University of Texas territory. There’s burnt orange everywhere and I can finally see the Longhorn’s massive football stadium. My driving is on autopilot, syncing with the dulcet tones of Eliza Moneypenny, the English woman who lives in my GPS and tells me what to do. All of the sudden, she says, “Arriving at destination on left.” I don’t see anything except a few municipal buildings and parking decks. Just then my phone rings.

It’s Nicole and Jessie, old friends from Florida. Nicole lives in Austin and is becoming my hostess and hotel for 2 days. I ditch my search for Scholz and go to meet up with the gals for some lunch at Toasties, go for a dip at a spring, meet up with some more old Florida friends at the Oasis, and find the bat bridge.

After an awesome afternoon that can scarcely be summed up in a paragraph, we decide to hit “Easy Tiger.”  I had heard from several folks that this place is great.

Nicole drives Jessie and I to a little spot downtown with a small unassuming sign and we get a parking space on the street right in front! Seriously, best parking space ever! As we walk into Easy Tiger, all we can see is a pleasant bakery. There is almost no clue to the fact there is a rather large bar and beer garden just below our feet.

There is it. A sign and a staircase. We read and do as we are told. I look into the bar area that we spill into. It is cozy with a modern look. There is deliberate fashionable artistry to the decor. We walk a bit and stumble into the garden.

It is night time, so the strings of lights give a nice ambiance. There are plenty of people but it isn’t packed. We find a place to sit at a table where a couple looks like they are on a date. They don’t seem to mind.

Our chipper waiter brings us a healthy drink menu. They have a fantastic selection of craft beers. I get something local that I can’t remember (that will be a permanent theme, I feel). I go around to take a few snapshots of the area, but in all honesty, I am not terribly concerned about the beer garden right now. It is good to just be sitting down and having a drink with my friends after a week on the road with only myself and strangers.

I ignore the huge artificial rock wall behind me. I brush off the set of 3 ping pong tables down by the little creek on the side of the property. I don’t even hear the music that is being piped in at a perfectly reasonable volume. I am just 100% content.

We talk for a while. It is great. I don’t take a single note. I don’t ask if the owner or a general manager is available for some questions. The girls and I just chat and laugh. It’s great.

Ultimately, my experience on Easy Tiger is not one of counting the number of tables or finding out what kind of trees they have, but rather pure experience for experience sake. It is an interesting place that spins and succeeds with an interesting idea: bakery/beer garden. It is well put together and it gives me what I want in a beer garden: a place to have a conversation over a drink outside. I can’t tell you why it works, I can only tell you that it works. Good enough for me.