Austin’s Hottest New Restaurant is Texas’ First True Beer Restaurant: The Beer Evangelist Finally Gets His Own Place, Taps Kitchen Stars to Transform Bar Food

When I think bar food, my mind immediately goes to that small bowl of pretzels placed precariously on a bar counter, that are so salty that you would think they spent a summer soaking in the Dead Sea. While the options for decent bar food in Austin have increased over the years thanks to exceptions like Easy Tiger’s wonderful menu, there’s still a void.

Food that infuses the spirit of a brewery instead of simply complementing the beer is lacking. Longtime beer aficionado (his Twitter handle is even BeerEvangelist) Jake Maddux decided to change that with his new East Austin spot, The Brewer’s Table, located at 4715 East Fifth Street.

Maddux tells PaperCity that his desire to open Brewer’s Table came out of a drive to create something that he is truly passionate about. He grew up in a restaurant family, and worked his way through the beer and wine world (first in Napa, then Colorado) before making his way down to Austin to focus on brewing at Thirsty Planet, and later becoming the food and beverage director of Salt and Time.

After many years in the industry, Maddux saw a hole in Austin’s drinking scene — a place where a lover of food and beer like Maddux would want to hang out all the time.

Maddux acknowledges that Austin certainly isn’t lacking amazing beer and food, but he’s “excited about being the first restaurant in Austin to intertwine beer and food in a comprehensive and thoughtful manner and taking that one step further into cross pollinating ideas and concepts by having a restaurant and brewery in the same space.”

The Brewer’s Table’s culinary team is headed up by Zach Hunter, who formerly worked at two Michelin starred restaurants and most recently, spent time as the  chef de cuisine at Austin darling Fixe.

“Our brewer Drew (Durish) and Zach have formed an amazing relationship that is reciprocal and creative”, Maddux says. “Zach has learnt about Drew’s craft to understand how every ingredient in the brewing process has its raw form, its mid-process form, its finished form, its waste form.”

Integrating beer into food is one thing, but I was wholly impressed by how well Chef Hunter was able to integrate it into the dessert menu, with dishes such as saison baba cake, an inventive cake finished off with smoked sweet potato and espresso-mascarpone mousse and a frozen pretzel cake, topped off with strawberry gelato, raw goat cheddar, tart cherry and stout crisps.

“I gave chef this challenge that I like to give people on how to execute beer into food,” Maddux says. “There are four ingredients in beer — water, hops, yeast and malt. I asked him to convert that into a dish for me. He came back with an ice cream cone.

“The cone is made from spent grain, which is then turned into flour, then dough, and finally a cone. The ice cream is made from barley and using yeast from the bottom of the tank, which we have made into caramel, then sous vide hops to make hops honey, before finishing it with hops salt.”

The result, Maddux says, is a beautiful ice cream cone that is the most unassuming personification of what the Brewer’s Table is all about — looking at how beer and food are the same thing.

There’s a common adage in the wine world that it takes a lot of beer to make wine, with many of the winery workers preferring to drink beer after hours. When asked if it goes the other way, Maddux admits, “After I finished up last night, I opened up a bottle of chardonnay.

“While I do like wine, for me nothing eclipses the magic and (beer’s) ability to pair with so many different types of food.”

The Food and Beer Marriage

The Brewer’s Table shows diners that food and beer are the same thing, playing off of the four ingredients in beer — water, hops, yeast and malt — to create dishes such as Chicken Paprikash made with parsley lardo, beer grain spaetzle and a crispy skin.

The dinner menu also features shareable feasts — a choice between Ranch (Heritage Red Wattle Hog), Gulf (Crispy Yellowtail Snapper), or Garden (hearth roasted cauliflower that has a 12-hour smoke) options. The lunch menu brings lighter options. One of my favorites is the Warm Heirloom Grain Bowl.

This is no normal grain bowl. Instead, it’s made with a malt soaked hen egg, grilled artichokes, fermented mushrooms and a sweet and spicy carrot gochujang to tie everything together.

Now, that’s beer food.