Earlier this spring, a new all-day bar and restaurant touting New Orleans fare and ambiance with Texas tinges, produced its way into in East Austin below the energy group of pitmaster Aaron Franklin and music maven James Moody. Uptown Sports Club opened at 1200 East Sixth Street on March 27.

Uptown had been a extended time coming for the abandoned constructing on the corner of East Sixth and Waller Streets. The physical space was constructed in the 1890s and was a bakery/butcher shop/marketplace, per the Towers. And then it became a bar and cafe referred to as the Sport Bar by owner Arnold Hernandez in the 1960s into the 1990s when its name changed to Uptown Sports Club (therefore the present name) below son Ron Hernandez. Arnold died in 2000 and Ron had planned on reopening the small business afterward, but he died in 2014 in the course of a motorcycle accident.

Then, in 2016, Franklin, Moody, and Jason Jones (a lawyer in Fort Worth) purchased the historic constructing, as reported by Austin Month-to-month by way of the Hernandez family members. Their intention was usually to open a sandwich-geared restaurant and bar, as Eater Austin uncovered in 2020. Moody, who is from New Orleans, and Franklin has family members from the state, according to Statesman. There was a point when the defunct constructing had been flyered with what-turned-out-to-be fake indicators announcing that a Chili’s was going to open back in 2017 (see if you can locate the Chili’s cap in the space).

A corner featuring sports pennants and plants at Uptown Sports Club.

Nadia Chaudhury/Eater Austin

The resulting Uptown Sports Club is an all-day spot with a New Orleans-leaning meals and drinks menu (no reservations). Of the former, there are po’ boys produced with bread from New Orleans bakery Leidenheimer Baking Organization, with fillings like hot roast beef fried Gulf shrimp, fried green tomatoes and a club with roast beef, smoked turkey, and bacon. Then there’s a chicken and sausage gumbo with rice caviar served with New Orleans’s Zapp’s chips and red beans with rice. (Franklin has produced each gumbo and pulled pork po’ boys for meals events in 2016 and 2017.) And, a lot like numerous restaurants opening today, there’s a raw bar with seafood platters, East Coast oysters, and shrimp cocktails.

And then, drinks include things like cocktails like the namesake Uptown with mezcal, sotol, yellow chartreuse, and a rosemary uncomplicated the Rope a Dop with gin, St. Germain, and an absinthe mist and the Corkscrew Punch with vodka, rum, and pineapple. The bar does serve classic New Orleans drinks like Sazeracs, Vieux Carre, and French 75s produced with cognac. There’s a powerful nonalcoholic cocktail displaying also, such as the No Hitter produced with a boozeless whiskey, and the Low Blow with a nonalcoholic spirit that is a mix of allspice and cardamom.

There are also freezes — primarily slushies in flavor combinations like orange and cream cherry jubilee, and chicory and chocolate — that can be boozified, as a nod to New Orleans diner Camellia Grill, as reported by Statesman. Plus, per its daytime hours, there are coffees and teas, freshly squeezed juices, morning cocktails (which includes a bloody mary produced with a Franklin Barbecue spice rim), beers (which includes a collaboration with Meanwhile Brewing), and wines by the glass and bottle.

The gumbo at Uptown Sports Club.

Nadia Chaudhury/Eater Austin

A po’ boy from Uptown Sports Club.

Nadia Chaudhury/Eater Austin

The shrimp cocktail at Uptown Sports Club.

Nadia Chaudhury/Eater Austin

Rounding out the culinary group is chef de cuisine Rene Garza, who previously worked at sibling Mexican restaurant Suerte and its seafood counterpart Este. Then there’s bar manager Ericka Predmore (per Statesman) and bar consultant Robert Björn Taylor (who consulted on Moody’s other current bar Gear Space).

The space was redone by Tenaya Hills (who is Bunkhouse Group’s senior vice president of style and improvement), along with her style partners Rose Barnett and Paige Finley, plus Hsu Workplace of Architecture’s Michael Hsu and Ken Johnson. Moody approached Hills about functioning on the restaurant, which tends to make sense seeing as the two also worked on Bunkhouse hotel bar Gear Space (see above).

Provided the East Sixth Street building’s history, the style/building teams had to preserve numerous elements of the important structure. This played properly seeing that Hills truly got her masters degree in historic preservation from the University of Texas at Austin.

“We wanted it to really feel like it is usually been right here,” Hills tells Eater in late March. “We wanted it to have the classic underlay, but we wanted to make it really feel like it had been remodeled more than the years. It should really have layers and layers and layers.” The group restored the windows, doors, and ceilings of the current structure.

There are no televisions, regardless of the uncomplicated assumption men and women can make that it is a sports bar per the name. So in order to style the space, the teams leaned into the notion of sportsmanship. There are pennants on the walls, hanging boxing gloves, vintage photographs, and other connected objects,

The entryway of Uptown Sports Club.

Nadia Chaudhury/Eater Austin

The corner portion of the bar is an antique sourced from Philadelphia — the group replicated the rest of the wraparound bar. Likewise, the smaller sized booths along a wall are from Philadelphia as properly. Elsewhere, there are neon indicators announcing cocktails and sandwiches, loads of plants, a brick wall, mosaic tiles (which includes at the entrance urging men and women to “be a sport”), and person round red tables with gold trim.

This is not the initially Franklin-Moody group-up. That is their meals and music festival Hot Luck, along with Portland-primarily based Mike Thelin, which is truly taking spot this week.

Also below Franklin’s belt is Asian smokehouse restaurant Loro with Uchi’s Tyson Cole, which has areas in Austin, Dallas, and a forthcoming one particular for Houston. He also has published a number of books about barbecuing and other reside-fire/meat cooking, with his most current one particular, Franklin Smoke, which came out earlier this month.

Moody is also the owner of downtown music venue the Mohawk, and is the co-founder of branding organization Guerilla Suit (which also did Uptown’s branding).

Uptown Sports Club is open from eight a.m. to two a.m. Wednesday by way of Monday. There are indoor and outside dine-in solutions.

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