Lunch at the Driskill Hotel
The historic Driskill Hotel in downtown Austin is the oldest operating hotel in Austin Texas. Completed in 1886, this Romanesque Revival style hotel is one of the most beautiful buildings in all of Austin. The luxurious interior lobby and lounges are finely decorated and celebrate Texan themes. Paintings of prairies, lone stars in most tiles, and naturally a steer head mounted on the wall. I had the pleasure of stopping by for lunch during my visit to Austin.
The restaurant was not yet opened, so I sat down at the bar. Since I was still recovering from my massive burger from the night before, I ordered a healthy(ish) lunch of split pea soup and a salad filled with all sorts of goodies.
There was a business man, who appeared to be a regular, day drinking there. We talked for a while about the city, politics, and life. He shared an interesting perspective on the pros and cons of not having a state income tax. Texas, is one of the few states that does not have income tax. This seems very appealing at first, but the money has to come from somewhere. In addition, lack of funding can have some detrimental effects on the infrastructure of the entire state.
There is something special about the feeling that you get sitting at a bar at such a historic place. Its hard to imagine how many countless people of varying “importance” sat in the very same place over the last hundred years. If the walls could talk I am certain that they would share stories that you would never be able to find in the local history books.
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- 2024
- Reinstalling Windows at 1am
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Future Fonts from Blog – Brad Frost
- 21st Century C++ from Communications of the ACM
- Submarines DevCon 2025 Keynote Speech from JoshHaines.com
- How I Use AI: Meet My Promptly Hired Model Intern from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- DeepSeek from Maggie Appleton
- Digital Reality Digital Shock from Christopher Butler
- 10 habits to help becoming a Debian Maintainer from Optimized by Otto
- Tiny corners from Manuel Moreale RSS Feed
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Weekend Update #12
The weekly update, plus bits and bobs that caught my attention this week.
via ODonnellWeb March 30, 2025"An off switch? She'll get years for that."
Vizio: "Please enjoy falling asleep to these calming nature scenes, occasionally punctuated with unhinged fascist rants. As a treat." I left the tv idle while I went to the other room to play with my dog. After about a half an hour, I started heari…
via jwz March 29, 2025Generated by openring