Best Thing I Ate This Week: Golden Hour cafe elevates dining scene in far South Austin

If you want a snapshot of how much Austin is changing, pop into Golden Hour on Menchaca Road. The cafe and bottle shop located in the Perch apartment complex just south of William Cannon Drive has brought a casual sophistication to far South Austin that would have been unheard of just a few years ago.

The section of town south of William Cannon has never seen the likes of Golden Hour, an airy space where daylight spills in from several sides, splashing onto a minimalist but inviting room colored with handsome wooden tabletops and modernist metal fixtures.

The cafe/bottle shop hybrid is quite the calling card for the apartment complex. Imagine waking to a coffee shop that serves granola bowls and freshly made, stellar breakfast burritos and transitions into a small-plates cafe in the afternoon and evening. Chef Barclay Stratton, a veteran of Lenoir and Blue Farm in New York City, and beverage director Evan Dunivan, whose plant-based cafe and wine bar in Brooklyn, Demi Monde, closed during the pandemic, opened Golden Hour in November.

The cafe serves pastries from Odd Duck Market in the first part of the day, along with several composed dishes, with a menu of snacks mid-day and a few larger format dishes in the evening. I popped in for a recent working lunch and was surprised by the location (if you don't pay close attention, you'll certainly miss it as you zip up or down Menchaca) and the thoughtfulness of the two dishes I tried.

This isn't a place to grab foil-wrapped tacos from another vendor or a simple salad at lunch. The tiny kitchen sources bread from Sour Duck's exceptional baking program for a robust challah bread layered with a juicy tomato slice as thick as a pocket bible and slices of smoked salmon under which oozes a generous helping of tart labneh. The dish is finished with a drizzle of olive oil, and at $12 is something of an oddity at Austin restaurants: a value.

The nutty seeded sourdough from Sour Duck gives a contrasting crunch to the soft jumble of finely chopped beef tartare ($16) made from A Bar N Ranch (Celina, Texas) wagyu, the primal beefy flavor zapped with classic accoutrements of Dijon, caper and pickled shallot. It's better than the beef tartare dish you'll likely find at your favorite steakhouse in Austin, and, arriving generously layered on toast, it saves you some work.

Captivated by those offerings, I returned earlier in the day to see if they could elevate the more traditional breakfast offerings, as well. Bingo. The breakfast burrito, wrapped in a toasty tortilla, is packed with a tumble of soft scrambled eggs, diced chives and crispy, cooked down potatoes, all held together with a homemade habanero aioli and a swirl of creamy, melted queso Chihuahua. I've not had a better breakfast burrito in town.

If the hour were later, I would have paired the dishes with one or two of Golden Hour's half-dozen wines by the glass or cracked one of the almost two hundred bottles of low intervention, small-label wines on offer. As it was, I purchased a bottle of La Pie Colette from Mouthes Le Bihan ($27) to enjoy this weekend poolside, because obviously you can't drink Golden Hour's wines at Perch's pool just across the courtyard, as tempting as it may be.

A shop that makes great coffee drinks, sells copious natural wine bottles and makes cafe food much better than you could hope or expect, all located at the base of an apartment complex in the southern reaches of the city — Golden Hour is a unique offering, and one I hope inspires imitators, but imitators that pay the same care to quality, execution and service as this new South Austin beacon.

If you go ...

Golden Hour, 7731 Menchaca Road, goldenhouratx.com

Hours: 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Golden Hour cafe and bottle shop on Menchaca Road is elevated dining