I’ve been eating lots of delicious food from Austin restaurants lately. Well, not “lots” in the sense of buying more than I usually do, but I’m making sure that I keep up my normal dining-out budget, even as I’m staying at home. I’m no economist, but I feel that if most of us can all mostly keep the normal demand for food (meaning: don’t hoard food from the grocery store, and continue to spend your typical budget at your favorite coffee shops, restaurants, and breweries) then some good will done.
Is food delivery safe? I know that lots of people have questions about the safety of food delivery amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, and I plan on writing an entire blog post about that. But for now, I’ll just say that we’re using common sense, ordering from restaurants that we trust, and have researched enough to feel safe with the decisions we’re making.
I also want to mention this: if you want to support local restaurants but you don’t feel like researching where to go, I made it really easy for you! Go to my instagram profile and look at my highlights. The first 8 or 9 of them are called TO-GO, and each one is a different category like Tex-Mex, dinner, booze, BBQ, etc. Click through the photos until you find something that looks delicious, and then order it to enjoy at home!
Here are a few takeout options we’ve been enjoying at home recently:
Hestia Date Night Meal
Nate and I ordered in for our 3 year anniversary dinner at home. It was really fun to create splurge on a nice restaurant meal and create a fun date night environment at home (candles, music, flowers, wine, dim lighting.) I’ll be honest, y’all: it felt weird to fix my hair and get dressed up just to walk into the dining room for dinner, but it really made a difference in making the night feel like a date, rather than yet another Friday night at home.
Hestia has a few options on their takeout/delivery menu, but the $160 date night meal is perfect if you’re celebrating your birthday or anniversary during Austin’s shelter-in-place We chose the 60 day dry-aged New York strip meal, which came with sourdough, wedge salad, king crab salad, broccoli and beef fat béarnaise, Basque burnt cheesecake, and a famous monster cookie.
If you live within 5 miles of the restaurant, they’ll deliver it to your door for $5. The food showed up on our porch, and we plated it, coursed it out, and savored it over a lovely 3-hour dinner (haha, we really savored it!) paired with a bottle of Spanish wine that we had been saving from our honeymoon. |CLICK TO ORDER| Pickup and delivery available.
St. Elmo Brewing Co.
I’m thankful for all the breweries that have made it so easy to safely pick up beer to enjoy at home. Here’s how it works at St. Elmo: we ordered a few crowlers online and selected the “curbside pickup” option. Once we got to St. Elmo, we parked out front, texted them that we had arrived, opened the trunk and waited in the front seat. A friendly staff member came outside and put our delivery in the trunk (so we had more than 6 feet between us the entire time) and we had delicious Chico Pale Ale with our dinner that night! |CLICK TO ORDER| Pickup available.
Spicy Boys Food Truck
I don’t say this lightly: I have NEVER tasted fried chicken quite this delicious in my entire life. I’m not kidding. Once you finish your Spicy Boys meal, you’ll immediately want to place another order, so be warned.
We got Spicy Boys delivered during our quarantine, and it was super easy. I got an OG sandwich (my fave!) and Nate got the combo meal. Fyi, it looks like they’ve changed the website now so that the OG sandwich is only available through pickup, not delivery.
|CLICK TO ORDER| Pickup and delivery available.
Clay Pit
I love this Indian restaurant. It’s near campus, so I used to meet Nate there for dinner back when we were dating and I was in grad school at UT. They offer delivery through UberEats. We ordered chicken korma and lamb vindaloo and naan, and curled up on the couch to watch a Wes Anderson film. For just a moment, it felt like a regular life, pre-COVID19. 😉 |CLICK TO ORDER| Pickup and delivery available.
Henbit Monster Cookie
I crave this thing all the time, and I’m really happy that Henbit is offering delivery on them. If you know someone who’s having a birthday in Austin, you could place an order of 4 monster cookies and have them delivered to their porch. Happiest. Birthday. Ever! |CLICK TO ORDER| Pickup and delivery available.
Psst: here’s a list of the best cookies in Austin
ABGB
Just give me pizza and beer, and everything feels ok. ABGB’s beer garden is one of the places I miss most right now, but it’s nice to be able to order a pizza and a few crowlers of beer to enjoy at home. They also have one of the safest pickups I’ve seen so far (although, I haven’t tried very many because I’m just coming out of a 14-day quarantine.) If you’ve never been, the Hell Yes Helles is one of my very favorite beers in the city. It’s a light, crisp lager that pairs perfectly with pizza. |CLICK TO ORDER| Pickup available.
Hope you’ve been consuming lots of delicious local food during your shelter-in-place. Only in 2020 can you order food from a local restaurant and be treated like a hero, haha! A friend of ours was joking that he’s been going to St. Elmo for crowlers of beer, and he’s never been thanked so much just for drinking beer. Haha.
