3 restaurants named in our Austin360 Restaurant Hall of Fame 2022
Austin grabs plenty of national headlines for our new restaurants, and diners can be obsessed with chasing the new shiny objects on our scene.
But Austin has a rich history of locally owned businesses that have helped shape the city's culture and fed its communities. We started the Austin360 Restaurant Hall of Fame in 2021 to acknowledge stalwarts that have helped make Austin "Austin," whether they be daily drivers or special occasion destinations. Restaurants must be open for 20 years and still in business to be considered for inclusion.
We honored Hoover's Cooking, Matt's El Rancho, Chinatown, Dirty Martin's and Fonda San Miguel with our inaugural class. This year we shine our light on a Tex-Mex icon founded by one of the city's great characters, a beloved hamburger destination that has spawned multiple locations over its almost 50 years in business, and a farm-to-table trailblazer that is both special occasion restaurant and neighborhood hang spot.
More:2022 Dining Guide: The best restaurants in Austin
Cisco's: 'Nobody’s better for money or fame. Everyone’s an individual'
(1511 E. Sixth St. 512-478-2420, ciscosaustin.com)
In the first half century after Rudy “Cisco” Cisneros opened his eponymous bakery and cafe on East Sixth Street in 1950, there were no credit card machines, breakfast dishes were the restaurant’s lifeblood, and if you wanted a Bloody Mary it had to be a furtive one.
The restaurant now has a website and point of sales system, and serves dinner and liquor (legally). But from most appearances, things remain largely the same under an ownership team that includes Cisneros’ grandson, Matt, who purchased Cisco’s from his uncle and longtime operator, Clovis Cisneros, in 2017.
Butter for the biscuits comes in squirt bottles, and steam billows from plates of migas and huevos rancheros. Cisco’s veteran server of 33 years, Lydia Guerrero, still greets customers with a smile. And everyone’s treated as equals.
That was the biggest lesson Matt Cisneros learned from his famous grandfather, who ran the restaurant until he died in 1995.
“Everyone was equal, regardless of color or economic background,” Matt Cisneros said. “Seeing that in my childhood was super valuable because I had friends everywhere, whether it was East Austin or West Austin. It’s important to have that instilled early. Most kids don’t get that because it’s hard to teach it.”
For Matt Cisneros it was a lesson learned every time he stepped into the restaurant, whether it was to get a talking to from his father if he was in trouble as a child or to show up for a shift bussing tables in high school.
If he wasn’t patrolling the floor, ribbing customers (or his staff), the cigar-chomping Cisco could be spotted holding court at the large round table in the corner of the back dining room that hides behind the diner-style counter up front.
Dubbed the “Mayor of East Austin,” Cisco operated in the same manner whether talking to construction workers or his famous friends and regulars like Darrell Royal, Willie Nelson, Ben Crenshaw and President Lyndon Johnson. Pictures of those well-known regulars line the walls of the building originally constructed for a meat market in 1914.
“Nobody’s better for money or fame. Everyone’s an individual,” Matt Cisneros said of the approach his grandfather modeled for him. “It’s a mutual respect that would not have existed without four walls and some eggs.”
More:Why a list of 27? An explanation and dedication
Matt Cisneros was enamored of the restaurant his entire life, calling it “this majestic, really cool spot.” When his uncle, Clovis, who had threatened retirement for about a half-dozen years, came to the table with what Matt considered a reasonable sales price, the Austin High School graduate knew the time had come for him to carry the mantle as the third-generation of Cisneros to steer the business.
Austin looks a whole lot different than it did when Cisco died in 1995. To make minor tweaks and guide Cisco’s into the future, Matt Cisneros partnered with high school friend Will Bridges, who had already successfully taken over stewardship of legacy Austin brands Deep Eddy Cabaret and Antone’s; Rick McMinn, a commercial builder and co-owner of historic Hoffbrau Steakhouse; and local business and real estate investor Bryan Schneider.
While the buildings around Cisco’s may have changed over the years, many of the faces inside the restaurant have not, on both sides of the counter. Some employees, like Guerrero, have worked at Cisco’s for as long as Matt Cisneros can remember. And the third-generation owner says he regularly sees longtime customers who started coming to the restaurant in their youth now bringing in their children and grandchildren.
“The generational connection is something you can’t recreate,” said Cisneros, who credits the community and faithful customers as the main reasons behind the restaurant’s staying power.
As for the influx of new faces into both Austin and Cisco’s, Cisneros says he believes many new folks just want to tap into what makes Austin “Austin.” He takes seriously the responsibility of helping to maintain the character of the city his family has called home for almost 100 years.
“If we don’t do it, somebody else will,” Cisneros said.
Dan's Hamburgers: 'We know each other. We take care of each other'
(4308 Menchaca Road. 512-443-6131; 844 Airport Blvd. 512-385-2262; 5602 N. Lamar Blvd. 512-459-3239; 610 Old San Antonio Road. Buda. 512-312-5361; dans-hamburgers.com)
Dan Junk started receiving calls on his home phone, the number he offered for customer feedback, sometime in the early 1990s. He had changed the onion ring recipe at his Dan’s Hamburgers locations. A new batter had replaced the hand-breaded cracker meal. People were not pleased.
The calls continued for a week before Junk reached out to his daughter, Katie: “Tell the managers to change it back ASAP!” he told his oldest child, who had by that time been working for her dad for almost 20 years.
The beloved original onion rings returned.
“That’s the thing about my dad — people knew they could call him and he would answer the phone,” Katie Congdon said, sitting in a booth at the revamped Menchaca Road location of Dan’s Hamburgers this fall.
The lesson stuck with Congdon. Since 1998, she’s been running the multi-location burger operation her father started in 1973 on South Congress Avenue (there’s a Torchy’s Tacos on the site now), just a few blocks down from the old King Burger where Dan got his start.
Congdon arrives at one of the four Dan’s locations each morning, while diners are enjoying table service, along with scratch-made omelets, huevos rancheros and pancakes before the burger crowd crashes in. She checks in with her many longtime employees and customers to make sure everything’s humming along nicely and everyone’s happy. She doesn’t need a repeat of the Great Onion Ring Kerfuffle of the Early '90s.
She learned that hands-on management style at her parents’ side from the time she was a 13-year-old student at the old Fulmore Middle School, working unpaid shifts at her parents’ nearby restaurant. Junk, a Shawnee, Oklahoma, native, started making cheeseburgers in the early 1960s on South Congress Avenue at King Burger, two blocks from the middle school, before branching out on his own.
Congdon says her father’s success from his concern for quality products and never compromising, even when times were tough.
“He was always very true to the product. He’d never serve anything to customers he wouldn’t eat himself,” Congdon said about her late father.
That original Dan’s on South Congress Avenue eventually became a Fran’s Hamburgers. The monosyllabic and rhyming burger monikers led to no small amount of confusion and speculation, but the split wasn’t as juicy as one of Dan’s burgers: Dan and Frances divorced in 1990. Frances got the original store, along with the location on Cameron Road (which Dan ran briefly as a barbecue restaurant before moving back into his lane); Dan kept the remaining three.
The split may have fueled rumors and confusion, but Congdon says there was never bad blood among family members surrounding the divorce or the decoupling of businesses.
Frances and Dan still went to movies together after their divorce. The family (the couple had five children, and Frances had two from a previous relationship) continued to spend holidays together. Frances even went over to Dan’s house and made him dinner on occasion.
“They just couldn’t live together,” Katie says with a laugh.
Katie worked at her dad’s restaurants throughout her time at William B. Travis High School and St. Edward’s University, starting at the bottom and eventually moving to the top of the org chart.
“He told me I had to learn everything in the store first,” Congdon said.
She took over ownership of the three stores when Junk died in 1998, opened a new location in Buda near her home in Kyle in 2005, and rebuilt the Menchaca Road location in 2014, giving it the timeless feel of a '50s diner. That’s 48 years in the burger business, many of them spent with others who have given decades of their lives to Dan’s, like Menchaca store manager Marcos Alcantara, who has been with the company more than 35 years. And two of her own children returned to Texas in recent years to learn the business.
“We’re a family. That’s something our mom and dad instilled in us,” Congdon said. “We all work together elbow to elbow. We know each other. We take care of each other.”
And if you want to complain about the onion rings (you won’t want to), you can call Congdon at her office.
From 2021:5 classic Austin restaurants inducted into our new Austin360 Restaurant Hall of Fame
Wink: 'We’re throwing a dinner party, and everybody is a guest'
(1014 N. Lamar Blvd. 512-482-8868, winkrestaurant.com)
Wink owners Stewart Scruggs and Mark Paul lean against their wine bar dancing that conversational tango that only couples who’ve been together for decades can navigate, interrupting each other here, finishing the other’s sentences there, a smirk, a nod, a laugh.
They’re business partners, mind you, not romantic ones: They’ve owned and operated Wink together for more than 20 years. The men have weathered several massive cultural calamities over the life of Wink but still love showing up to work everyday. Their passion and personal investment (of time, of money, of faith) keep them going. That, and “We’re goddamn insane,” Paul says with a laugh.
The two chefs, both Austin natives, first worked together at Brio Vista on West Sixth Street in 1998, but their friendship pre-dates that by a half-dozen years to Valentine’s Day 1992 when Paul brought his now-wife into Zoot, which Scruggs helped open and which the men later purchased and ran for almost a decade.
Scruggs and Paul opened their farm-to-table fine dining restaurant tucked inside a strip mall on Lamar Boulevard in June 2001, serving a rotating menu that proudly listed its farm and ranch partners and featured items like duck, foie gras, and game.
Scruggs, who is the elder Wink statesman by about a decade and a graduate of St. Stephen’s High School, said it was easier to open an independent restaurant 20 years ago.
“Austin’s attitude was different in the sense that they appreciated and supported restaurants opening on a shoestring. That was the norm,” Scruggs said. “The vibe was more communal. There weren’t as many of us. There wasn’t so much at stake, so you could afford to help other chefs. And there was an almost engrained suspicion for high-falutin, corporate big money suddenly moving into town and opening a restaurant.”
It wasn’t easy for long. Wink’s opening came just three months before 9/11, the first of what would be several times the world changed. They debated whether to open that night. But they did. It was the only thing they could think to do, and a friend had a dinner party for 12 booked.
The night started very slowly, they say. Crickets. But within a few hours, it felt like the entire Clarksville neighborhood had descended on the small restaurant. The swelling of community is what Paul and Scruggs have always loved about restaurants.
“It was unbelievable. Every single table was talking to everybody else,” Paul said. “What you have to understand about what we do here is when the curtain goes up, we’re throwing a dinner party, and everybody is a guest. And people want to have that interaction. That’s the romanticism of this business.”
The ensuing decade saw Wink pull off the nifty feat of becoming both a beloved hangout for regulars, especially after the Cheers-like wine bar opened in the adjacent space in 2004, as well as a destination for couples and families celebrating special occasions.
Wink’s influence can be seen throughout a restaurant scene now obsessed with local and seasonal cooking. Scruggs’ and Paul’s kitchen served as a training ground for several chefs who now operate top Austin restaurants, such as John Bates at Interstellar BBQ and Bryce Gilmore of Barley Swine and Odd Duck.
Few restaurants with Wink’s price points can boast such a strong number of longtime regulars, and several of the faces inside the restaurant have been around longer than any customer. Chefs Eric Polzer and Rogelio Pelagio have been with Wink since the restaurant opened. Chef Parker White has led the kitchen for 10 years while also leaving his artistic mark on the wine bar with his colorful portraits of musicians, chefs, actors and other notables that line the walls.
Having escaped the economic calamities brought on by 9/11 and the stock market collapse at the end of that decade, Scruggs and Paul found themselves navigating another disaster, along with every restaurant owner, in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
The partners closed their restaurant for more than a year, made some internal improvement, regrouped and came back to work determined to keep their iconic restaurant on course for another decade. They acknowledge that most of their contemporaries in the relatively young Austin scene are gone save a handful like Sharon Watkins at Chez Zee; Bick Brown at Hyde Park Bar & Grill; Larry Foles and Guy Villavaso (Red Ash, ATX Cocina); Larry Perdido and Chuck Smith (Moonshine Grill); and Reed Clemons (The Grove). But they have no interest in stepping away from the industry they love, regardless of challenges that come from competition, rising costs and staffing shortages.
“I don’t even know what the word retirement means, and it’s not because of money, it’s because I don’t want to,” Paul said. “You want to be mentally stimulated and you want to be part of the game. When you’re in an artistic profession, which I think this is, you have to be passionate about what you do. And if you question that for one second, then you shouldn’t be there.”
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: 3 restaurants inducted by the Austin360 Restaurant Hall of Fame 2022
