A Weird Café in Austin

I was made aware of the phrase, “Keep Austin Weird,” before I came down here for the summer and was given to understand it is an unofficial motto of the city, a call for its denizens to support the myriad of eccentric local businesses rather than give in to the sterility of corporate standardization. The experience that brought the phrase home for me was The Spiderhouse Café, a restaurant of sorts near the UT campus.

Imagine if an entrepreneur decided to open a restaurant in his backyard. You enter through the side gate of the house and go around back where a haphazard assortment of lawn furniture awaits you arranged in no particular order. You sit where you please and a waitress comes around with menus printed on 8.5 X 11 sheets. Lights are strung from the trees, the fence is welded together from random assortments of metal parts, and there is a free flowing atmosphere to the place that must really be experienced to be appreciated, but can perhaps be summed up as weird. In all my travels, I have never encountered anyplace quite like The Spiderhouse Café, yet it is this brand of eccentricity that defines the city and makes it such an endearing place.

For more about the Spiderhouse Café

Adam Breckenridge is a graduate of the MFA in creative writing program at Antioch University in Los Angeles and currently lives in Oklahoma City where he works on classified military documents. He has traveled much of the United States and Europe and plans on taking on the rest of the world. He also writes a film column for http://www.examiner.com/x-3282-Oklahoma-City-Film-Examiner.