The Butterfly Bar

The Butterfly Bar opened in February 2011 inside The VORTEX, a long-running non-profit theatre on the Manor Road corridor in East Austin. It began as the theatre's small beer-and-wine cafe and became a full bar after securing a mixed-beverage licence in 2013. The VORTEX is a 501(c)(3), and every drink bought here supports the resident performing artists — which makes it one of the few bars in the country where the drinks are the funding model for something else entirely.

That structure shapes the room. The bar pours from a bartop reported to be over two hundred years old and opens onto a patio that is a certified monarch butterfly garden, with butterflies actually present through the summer. Patrizi's serves house-made Italian pasta from a truck in the garden, and the adjoining black-box theatre runs live performance most Thursday to Sunday, plus trivia, improv and movie nights.

Bar manager Kellee Broadway runs a dedicated, named mocktail menu priced around eight dollars — roughly half what a zero-proof cocktail costs at most bars, and a deliberate decision rather than a shortcut. Aphrodite's Kiss combines pomegranate, pineapple, lime and ginger beer. The Queen Bey is a strawberry limeade dusted with tajín, created by Broadway; the chilli-lime salt is doing the same job a salt rim does on a margarita, giving the drink a savoury edge that keeps it from reading as sweet.

A theatre bar is an unusually easy place not to drink, for the same reason a listening room is. The evening has a fixed centre that is not the bar — there is a show, it starts at a time, and afterwards people talk about it. Nobody is counting rounds, and there is a reason to be there that does not require a glass in your hand.

Open 5pm to midnight Sunday to Friday and to 1am on Saturday, at 2307 Manor Road.