Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2009 > September > 11 > Entry
Game Days at Bikinis on Sixth, Part 1
Sports-bar owners must pray for blackout games. And pay-per-view games. And away games.
How else are red-blooded fans going to share the mass social rituals of cheering the home team, throwing back brews and devouring comfort food?
“We’re making the world more beautiful one bikini at a time,” the Austin entrepreneur says without irony. He has quickly opened five editions of the Bikinis Sports Bar and Grill, including spots in San Antonio, San Marcos and Charlotte, N.C.
The first Bikinis transformed a freeway-side restaurant across Interstate 35 from Highland Mall in 2006. Guller’s most recent emporium, where female servers wear fairly modest bikini tops with Daisy Dukes below, opened just in time for football season in the former home of Roux and Jazz Louisiana Kitchen on East Sixth Street.
Judging from the crush on the first college football game day, Guller is filling a Sixth Street niche. Orange-jerseyed men — and a few women — occupied all the tables, upstairs and down, and spaces at the bar. This, four hours before kickoff.
The next Saturday, as the Longhorns played the University of Wyoming Cowboys in Laramie, torrential rain kept most Sixth Street spots empty. Not Bikinis.
Round Rock resident John Selvera was passing by and liked the roomy look. “It wasn’t so cramped and stuffy,” he said.
U.S. Marines Erick Rheinhart and Jon Buckland, based in Corpus Christi, had noted the plethora of big screens when they had walked by Bikinis’ open facade the previous night. Austin students Gerg McIvor and Mike Stobie said they liked the “good food at reasonable prices,” plus all the screens. “The waitresses are a bonus,” McIvor said.
“I love working here,” said veteran waitress Whitney Bell. “The girls are happy. The customers are happy. It’s a happy place.”
Of course, sports bars are proliferating like flat-panel, high-definition televisions in, well, sports bars. Besides locally based chains like Third Base and high-end experiments such as Cover 3, many of the approximately 900 Austin-area bars and restaurants licensed by the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission link up their screens to game day.
Along with sports bars, accentuated breasts are not uncommon these days, as comic author Sarah Bird noted in the September issue of Texas Monthly: “We’re living in the most boob-o-centric time since Napoleon dated Josephine.”
In fact, it’s difficult for your social columnist to snap a party picture in Austin without accidentally preserving evidence of casual cleavage for history. Even at conservative charity galas.
Leaving aside the outright strip joints, you’ve got numerous establishments like the Tilted Kilt, Twin Peaks and Bone Daddy. Then there’s the one company Guller thinks of as Bikinis’ competition. His employees refer to it as “H-dash-S.”
More to come.
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