A lot of the records you buy, there’s nothing you can hold in your hand, it’s all 1’s and 0’s, this digital cloud floating in the ether. but with analog albums, you can hold it in your hand.
Dave Grohl
Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters frontman
I joined the Automatic squad for a trip to Austin this week.
Rest assured, the town is still weird but now the weird comes from the expanding tension between analog and digital. Walk down South Congress and smell the leather at Allen Boots and the pizzas at Home Slice. Watch the hand-bent neon flicker but then contrast it with the Waymo-filled streets.
Austin still has classic analog venues like the Continental Club and the Broken Spoke but the money buying beers at those places comes, at least in part, from digital companies like Pegatron and Neurophos.
Like any serious person, I started the Austin trip with tacos at Matt’s El Rancho, the King of Mexican Food since 1952.
Matt’s is analog.
And it’s working. A unique feature of Texas is alcohol sales data per location is available to the public:
For dinner, Automatic brought together a group of analog types at Uptown Sports Club with hospitality maestro Aaron Franklin and his wife and partner, Stacy.
After epic success with Franklin Barbecue, the Franklins embarked on an eight year odyssey of (re)opening Uptown Sports. The building was first constructed in 1893 and had been vacant for a few decades when the Franklins and friends stepped in.
They preserved the building’s personality, but upgraded it for today’s East Austin sensibilities. It’s not a dusty relic preserved for preservations’ sake, it’s a bustling neighborhood watering hole reimagined for a new generation of imbibers.
Pro tip: order the El Jardinero (blanco tequila, aperol, cointreau, blood orange, and jalapeño) and pair it with steak frites.
Uptown Sports Club isn’t nostalgia, it’s a vivid example of what’s good and right with the analog hospitality industry.
Jack Sanders also joined us for dinner.
He’s a coveralls-wearing analog-living architect/welder/baseball commissioner most famous for creating The Long Time, a sandlot ballpark venue for those interested in family fun, good times, and mediocre baseball.
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Jack is both an inspiration and a reminder that “you can just do things”. And when you do them with your own hands, all the better.
Stan Nix also joined the dinner. Stan is a serious and seriously talented real estateur with, among many other ventures, a collection of hotels along South Congress Avenue that he continues to upgrade.
One of his properties is the Hotel San José.
Through the Plexi-Glass: the Last Days of the San Jose documents Liz Lambert’s stewardship of the seedy underbelly before transforming it into a cultural zeitgeist.
Aspiring visionaries be forewarned: you might not have the stomach for this amount of vision.
The dinner included a host of talented analog types - restaurateurs, property developers, music venue operators, and designers - all debating what makes for desirable places and then scheming on the next opportunity.
Day two started over coffee with new old friends Taylor Bruce and Breezy Mayo. Taylor built a publishing business with Wildsam and Breezy honed her hospitality skills at MML, the always on-point Austin-based hospitality group. Taylor and Breezy combined talents to create First Light, an analog diversion for the literary set.
The Automatic crew also got to spend time with Paul Bodenman, doing the painstaking work of rebuilding a street to its former glory.
Then the record skipped when the trip culminated with tour of Icon, a factory producing machines that 3D print buildings. It felt like the bleeding edge of technology: giant and precise robot arms squeezing out dainty lines of concrete like piping on a cake.
The process stacks concrete extrusions, one on top of another, as each layer hardens. The technology allows for curves and angles traditional construction methods can’t match.
Icon’s unique capabilites has attracted the attention of designers like Bjarke Ingels Group and Lake Flato.
Visiting Icon I felt as if I should be wearing a jetpack. It was a glimpse at what could be a wonderful new future for real estate development.
Icon is rooted in the digital, but the product is analog. The walls it creates look like hand-formed pottery - each line of concrete has small imperfections and color variations that bring it to life.
Icon’s next push is into the world of retail and restaurant buildings. I’m cheering them on as they bring new projects out of the digital ether into something (as Dave Grohl says) you can hold in your hand.
Automatic is coming to Dallas on April 27 & 28.
A few of the attendees:
Guss Firestein, Maman
Vipin Nambiar, HN Capital
Robert Quick, Western Addition/Il Bracco
Mark Toro, Toro Development Company
Sean Wen, Curry Boys
Amy Calcutt, Cactus Club Cafe
Terry Montesi, Trademark
Trystan Halpert, Moxies
Mark Masinter, Newmark
Anastasia Kouimelis, Levain Bakery
Brad Sanders, bartaco
Clare Walsh, Asana Partners
Jessica Johnson, Origin Realty Advisors
Daniel Lee, handies douzo
Mark Boekenheide, Dallas Mavericks
Brett Jones, Barracuda Taco Stand
Schafer Smartt, Larkspur Capital
Tess Howard, Alys Beach
Nima Fazeli, h.wood group
Robert Fader, Posman Books
Jeff Zeigler, Open Realty Advisors
Ryan McNeil, Veritas Development
Jess Bruner, Fox Restaurant Concepts
Victor Lugger, Big Mamma Restaurant Group
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