My main disagreement is that there's great Mexican food to be found if you skip the TexMex places and stick to interior Mexican places and small family-run taquerias.

I was struck how the author kept describing +100° as a "warm city". Is that part of that old Texas oversizing trope? "We call drop dead on the sidewalk heat 'warm'".

Csa (koppen) is apparently held by many to be the ideal human climate (yet cities in that climate regularly clip 105)

I always wonder if it might come down to ancestry. Perhaps northern and southern family trees subtly adapted to their climate, diverging on their ideal climate in the process.

Same with the weather. Too hot and humid most of the year, and recently we have been having really cold winters.

But the thing that gets me is what to _do_ here. Whatever half good thing you want to go, is already crowded or sucks or both, and there are not many in town anyway. Children really don't have many options here either. Hell, I grew up in a smaller town, and we had a science museum and an aquarium there.

I guess that Austin is just a college town trying to be a tech hub, which fits somehow if you are in your late 20s and early 30s. For the rest of us, it's just another city with plenty of jobs.

This is not an informed take AT ALL. Where have you encountered better Mexican food in the US than at Fonda San Miguel? There is a long list of great Mexican places in Austin with Fonda at the top. IF you have never been, Sunday brunch is the place to start.

There is a longer list of garbage tex-mex joints, that is true, but they are easy to avoid.

>> An[d] the weather, much of the year is unbearable.

This is 1000% correct, or if anything an understatement.

Tex-Mex is imo Americanised mexican food which doesn’t suck lol. Again, good restaurants will serve you excellent food.

Austin definitely has the best Breakfast tacos, and just tacos in general. SF has terrible tacos (burritos are different).

Every time someone mentions City X has terrible food without mentioning what restaurants they tried, Im immediately suspicious.

Press X to doubt.

I lived in Austin and dined at dozens of highly rated/reco'ed restaurants from food trucks to high end. My conclusion is that Austin does not have great food (though I do agree with your conclusion on breakfast tacos). This is not a uniform conclusion of course–Uchi and Barley Swine are in fact legit.

I don't claim they are. I mention them, because, in my experience, those are emblematic of the restaurants that top the recommendation lists year after year and are actually good.

Which restaurants top your list?

Personally, I find Fukumoto, Ebisu, and Komé, pretty good overall, and my personal favourite is Bon, actually in Bee Cave. I don't think any of them would be considered "fine cuisine", but that I also like.

Agreed the food was legitimately not-good at most places. There are some good ones ( Clarks Oyster Bar, Habesha Ethiopian, Evangelines ) , but mostly it was bland and the home cooking is downright disastrous.

The food is pretty decent if you avoid the suburban strip malls. I can think of several world class restaurants within walking distance of me.

It’s definitely not Houston in terms of the range of options, but then again has a quarter of the population, so that is to be expected.

And as someone who grew up in dreary London weather, the heat just doesn’t bother me at all. Definitely have to stock up on the Zyrtec though, but this is the first year having even here for many.

Agree on the weather. I've been to Austin a number of times. A number of years back, I had back to back events during the summer and spent the weekend rather than going home. I enjoyed myself well enough but remember it was very much an exercise in managing activities so that I wasn't too active in the heat of the day. Remember going to some nearby caves, and to hill country, and then watching the bats in the evening.

Also lived in New Orleans for a few years and recall summer days were mostly spent going from AC to AC.

But Austin's heat in the summer is more tolerable (generally drier) than what we have, so it's a tradeoff.

This is so ignorant, and drives me crazy every time I hear it. TexMex isn't Mexican food... let me repeat that: the Mexican food you're thinking of, was never the food in Texas. Texas has always been a region. TexMex is an authentic regional cuisine and is the product of 200 years of blending cultures.

Unlike California and Arizona, Texas was never cleared if it's Hispanic population through war, the Spanish American War. If you go to, say San Francisco, most of the Hispanic residents immigrated in the last 80 years or so. Three and a half generations back. That isn't the case in Texas. In Texas, many if not most of the Tejano population has been here since the days of Santa Anna. The food in Texas was last upended in the late 1800s when a gigantic influx of German/Czech Immigrants brought polka, sausages, brisket, and kolaches... sound familiar to Austin?

TexMex has always been in Texas. Flour instead of corn was due to crop growing conditions and availability. It's just through a quirk of history (again, the Spanish American War leads to everyone thinking native Tejanos are Mexican immigrants) that everyone comes to think that it's wrong. We even had a name for the food you are talking about when i was growing up, "Interior Mexican food." It's a completely different cuisine.

As time goes by, food changes... that's normal. TexMex in Austin has changed a lot since i was growing up in central Texas, just like BBQ has changed a lot, but it can be traced back to the Germans and Tejanos exchanging chili con carne for sausages, and pan dulce for kolache.

If you don't like it, that's fine, but don't compare it to retro-modern fare made by more contemporary Mexican-American immigrants, based on the various regions in Mexico during the mid-to-late-1900s.

It used to be you moved to Austin and got acclimated to the area, you learned how other people lived here. Then people started moving in so fast, they didn't take the time to learn 'the ways of the people', and then turned around and started teaching new people their version of Austin, and after a while, it got to be unrecognizable.

I spent my 20s and 30s in Austin and loved every minute of it. I would not trade it. I left this year after getting nearly double what I paid for my property. It was an amazing ride, but it's something else now, I hope the spirit stays alive.