One nice thing about being in Texas for so long was that I got to visit Austin for the first time. I didn’t get to try, taste and visit everything, but I did manage to eat quite a bit of delicious food and do some fun stuff.

My first stop? Round Rock Donuts.

You can smell the deep-fried deliciousness before you even walk in the door. Inside, the doughnuts are orange (allegedly because of the fresh eggs), but they taste like the perfect marriage of sugar and fat — imagine a Krispy Kreme doughnut with a little more substance. Highly recommend those. I also tried a fried cinnamon roll, which was good but not quite as cinnamony as I would have liked. The regular glazed, though, are pure (orange) gold. There aren’t any seats inside, so be prepared to eat in your car or, if it’s not 100 degrees, sit at the tables outside.

 

After a little (cough) shopping on South Congress Avenue, I decided to get something a bit more substantial at Guero’s Taco Bar. Sadly, I did not try a margarita here, but the brisket taco and cheese enchilada I had were very good. It was also really cute inside.

After lunch, I walked down to some other stores and stopped at Jo’s coffee for an iced turbo, which is some kind of magical iced coffee-chocolate-hazelnut-yumminess drink.

 

Next it was more shopping (there are some seriously great stores and little craft fair things on South Congress, y’all), and then a cupcake from this ridiculously adorable cupcake truck, Hey Cupcake!. Most of the flavors were pretty basic — chocolate, red velvet, vanilla, etc. But they did have this “24 carrot” carrot cake cupcake. and when I found out it contains pecans but no raisins, I was sold.

The cupcake was great — not too dry, good carrot and spice flavor, and smooth cream cheese frosting. The only problem was that it was so hot and I was already so full that I couldn’t finish the whole thing.

 

After checking out a cool local bookstore (BookPeople), I parked behind the newspaper building and walked out onto a bridge to watch bats fly away.

That’s weird, right? But apparently bats are totally a thing in Austin. Hundreds of thousands of Mexican bats roost under the Congress Avenue bridge for about half the year, and they all take off at dusk each night to go find food (thanks, bats, for controlling the mosquito population!). It’s pretty awesome, honestly.

 

After the bat watching, I thought I’d check out something else super Austin-y: A food truck park. I was only able to eat a taco and a half from Torchy’s Tacos (they were much bigger than I expected), but the fried avocado taco was seriously the best taco I’ve ever had. Breaded, fried avocado with refried beans, pico de gallo, lettuce and cheese. Genius.

I also had a frozen Mexican hot chocolate from the Holy Cacao truck. I had never tried frozen hot chocolate before, but I can’t imagine anywhere else having anything better — it was exceptionally chocolatey, with a hint of spice and the perfect sort of icy texture. Definitely a must-have (although I wouldn’t blame you for getting the chocolate mint flavor instead).

Sunday, I got a late start (again) and ended up eating lunch at a place that was cute but not great. I had a pimento cheese sandwich, and the pimento cheese was not nearly spicy or pimento-y enough. Then I went to this huge outdoor mall situation, The Domain, to shop for new work clothes. For dinner, I hit up Frank, a really fun restaurant that has a variety of gourmet hotdogs and sausages and an extensive bar list. Also, our friend’s brother used to work there, but I didn’t know that until later.

I had a really hard time deciding because I love hot dogs (I accidentally ordered two on Toby and my first date, if you recall), but I don’t generally like sausages because of the texture. Also, almost everything on the menu sounds fantastic.

I ended up going with the Southern Belle, a blackened hotdog with pimento cheese, fried green tomatoes, Cajun remoulade and scallions (I got the remoulade on the side). Now THAT was a hot dog. It was seriously spicy, but oh-so-good. The pimento cheese was roughly 100 times better than the version I had for lunch. I also had some macaroni and cheese — good but not great — and a Kentucky peach to drink.

The drink was bourbon, lemonade, basil and white peach juice. Definitely a winner.

 

I also met some really nice people while sitting at the bar at Frank (everyone in Austin is super nice, actually), and they told me about a few dessert places I could try. I probably should have just ordered one of the amazing-sounding desserts at Frank, but I wanted to try this adorable ice cream place, Lick, instead.

Lick looks like a pretty normal ice cream parlor, but their flavors are anything but ordinary. I was a little scared of some of them (candied tomato, basil and balsamic just sounds wrong to me, and I couldn’t wrap my head around roasted beet ice cream), but I tasted the goat cheese, thyme & honey flavor and then ordered quark with fig jam, cardamom pear cake, and honeyed peaches with rosemary.

The goat cheese and quark (a type of cheese) flavors were sort of flavorless to me — they just tasted like some kind of neutral sweetness, and the texture was a bit too flaky for my taste. The cardamom pear cake and honeyed peaches with rosemary were more flavorful, but still pretty mild and not quite as creamy as I’d like.

After all that, I would definitely recommend visiting Austin. It’s probably best if you fast for a few days beforehand, though, because there are tons of great places to eat and not enough room in a normal human stomach for all that food. And I have more restaurants to recommend from the other weekend I visited. But here are my faves from the first visit:

To eat and drink:
Round Rock Donuts (north of Austin)
Jo’s coffee
Guero’s Taco Bar
Frank
Torchy’s Tacos truck
Holy Cacao truck

To do:
Shop on South Congress Ave. (I particularly enjoyed Tesoros and Uncommon Objects)
See the bats
Eat or drink something from a food truck (they stay in place here, so you will have to go to them)
Shop at The Domain (they just have normal stores that can be found elsewhere, but the layout is nice and there’s sometimes live music on the weekends)
Go to BookPeople (because local bookstores are awesome. There’s also a big Anthropologie next door)