A Girl Walks Into a Bar: Dry Creek Cafe and Boat Dock

Head to this old-school Austin dive for a drink of a different age

My friend Terry, a lifelong Austinite, looked around the Dry Creek Cafe and Boat Dock and recalled coming there as a child once, and again after college. He remembered going up to the deck and that Crosby Stills & Nash was playing on the jukebox both times. Terry has a remarkable memory, but he also had the advantage of the fact that Dry Creek hasn’t changed much in the last 60 years.

It’s a dilapidated dive bar on a now-fancy stretch of Mount Bonnell Road. Sleek multimillion-dollar homes sit along the same street, while at Dry Creek there’s a giant broken box fan, old tables and folding chairs, and a string of lights in an upstairs room that looks like a combination of some grandparent’s forgotten attic and a treehouse. The paper towel dispenser outside the banged-up bathrooms has no towels written across it in black ink. (So, there are no towels.)

The pool table sits near the jukebox downstairs, and the jukebox plays old 45s: Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash, Linda Ronstadt and Dusty Springfield, among others. Some of the tags beside song numbers have the title and artist written by hand; some look to have been typed on a typewriter. Beer costs $3 or less, and it comes in a can or bottle. The rule is that you bring your empties back—bottles go in the box by the cash register, cans on the counter. And it’s cash only.

Wednesday is the regulars’ night, and people gather for Wheel of Fortune. Angel, the bartender who’s been there five years, told me I could only talk to the owner Buddy at 6 or 7 p.m. because 6:30 was reserved for Wheel of Fortune. Angel reportedly solves the puzzles faster than anyone. If you’re faster than Angel, you get to wear the dunce cap.

Sarah Ransom—the late owner of Dry Creek—was famous for her sharp tongue. She took over the bar from her brother in the 1950s, when rough-tongued cedar choppers frequented it. Her favorite song on the jukebox, someone told me, was “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road.” Ransom died in 2009 at age 95. Her obituary in the Austin American-Statesman notes that she was affectionately known as the meanest bartender in Austin and that she didn’t mind the moniker.

But she did mind change. Her son Buddy once had the place painted, and his mom got mad at him. “She got all upset because she said, ‘You painted it yellow.’ I said, ‘Mom, it was yellow, it had been there for 50 years.’” The yellow had bleached out over time—he’d just repainted it the same color.

Jay “Buddy” Reynolds is 80 years old now. A former mining engineer, he bought the place from his mom in 1984, then leased it back to her until she couldn’t run it anymore. He built the house just behind the bar.

While I chatted with Buddy one Wednesday—not long after Wheel of Fortune—several regulars stopped by the front table where we sat and introduced themselves, grabbing a chip or two from a bag in the center of the table as they did. There weren’t more than a dozen or so people there, and there were even fewer on the Saturday I stopped by with friends.

My friends Terry and Anina and my husband and I sat outside and talked about other bars. We described the places mostly by what they used to be: the new jazz club in the old Spaghetti Warehouse building, or Workhorse, the bar on North Loop where the Parlor pizza joint used to be. By contrast, when we’d texted about where to meet that night, all I said was “Dry Creek at sunset.”

A lot of things have changed in Austin in the last 60 years, and very few have changed at Dry Creek. It’s been called an old-school Austin dive—and it certainly feels like it belongs to a different era.