As the evening’s first customers stroll into Wink Wine Bar on a Saturday, my friend and I notice that they head straight for the leather-backed seats at the bar. The bartender warmly greets one with a “Well, there you are!” as if she’s been waiting for him all night. It’s not even five o’clock.
Every Tuesday through Saturday, loyal locals come here for one of the best happy hour deals in Austin: almost the entire bar-food menu is half off from 4:30 to 6 p.m. For less than $12 per dish, diners can indulge in macaroni and cheese with black truffles, mussels steamed in a harissa-seasoned fumet,
or grilled flatbread topped with white anchovies and Parmesan. They can choose the $8 Wink burger with Brie and caramelized onion or splurge on the $9 version topped with brown-sugar bacon and fourme d’Ambert, a semihard mild blue cheese.
All the food is prepared in the kitchen next door, at Wink Restaurant, a fine-dining stalwart for 23 years. In the summer of 2001, Mark Paul and Stewart Scruggs opened their white-tablecloth establishment—one of the few in town at the time—in a nondescript space in a strip mall tucked off North Lamar Boulevard, less than a mile west of the Capitol. Inspired by the slow food movement, the chef-owners created an upscale yet low-key venue with an extensive wine selection and a menu that changed daily based on locally available ingredients.
The restaurant built a reputation as a place for both à la carte dinners and shoot-out-the-lights seven-course meals. My first experience there fell into the latter category. My new boyfriend at the time, Steve, and I rang in New Year’s Eve together at a late dinner six months after Wink opened. At midnight, the kitchen staff, including Paul and Scruggs, joined us for a champagne toast.
Steve (who became my husband) and I have been many times since. I’ve kept a lot of those menus, going back to 2002, and they still look basically the same. On the front, the à la carte list starts with a soup and a couple of salads and builds from there into entrées of seafood, duck, steak, and other proteins. On the back is the chef’s tasting menu (Wink offers pescatarian and vegetarian menus as well). During a recent dinner, I chose a chilled potato and leek soup, a cobia sashimi in aguachile, and a strip steak served with ancho-mushroom gravy. We ended the meal as we always do, sharing the Wink Trio: a petite crème brûlée, a lemon meringue “pot,” and a round of flourless chocolate cake.
Paul and Scruggs still run Wink; they opened the wine bar in 2004 to entertain diners waiting to be seated. Two other chefs, Rogelio Pelagio and Eric Polzer, have also worked there from day one. Along with groundbreaking restaurants such as Tyson Cole’s Uchi, Wink helped usher in the golden age of dining in Austin and served as a training ground for many notable chefs. New hot spots have come and gone, but Wink endures.
One notable change emerged after Wink’s eighteen-month closure during the pandemic: more diners are choosing the wine bar, where they can order from its menu as well as from the restaurant’s à la carte items. “The wine bar is now more of the day-in-and-day-out bistro,” Paul tells me.
On the evening my friend and I visit, we let the regulars have the barstools, choosing a high-top table instead. We admire the painted portraits covering the walls, the work of longtime Wink chef Parker White. Most are of celebrities, but the faces hanging directly over the bar stump us. Paul explains that they are all Wink regulars, including the late musician Steven Fromholz and Carol Ann Sayle, an owner of Boggy Creek Farm.
We have a hard time choosing from the wine list, with more than fifty offerings by the glass. Fortunately, the bartender will pour you a taste of anything that intrigues you. We settle on the 2020 Post Scriptum de Chryseia Duoro, a rich red from Portugal, and then make a dinner out of the chicken liver pâté and flatbread sampler.
As a classic song by the Who plays in the background, I look again at the portraits of the regulars, hovering over the bar as if to remind us not to take quiet, consistent establishments like Wink for granted.
Wink
Address: 1014 N. Lamar Blvd, Austin
Most Popular Dish: The Wink Trio
Year Opened: 2001
This article originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “A Wink and a Nod.” Subscribe today.
