Southwestern Grill Z’Tejas Opens New Location in Avery Ranch

Longtime Austin restaurant Z’Tejas is opening a new location in Avery Ranch. It’s opening at 14900 Avery Ranch Boulevard in the Avery Ranch shopping center on Monday, May 23. The new Z’Tejas will serve restaurant favorites like green chile mac n’ cheese and enchiladas alongside a new daily breakfast. The restaurant will hold a week-long celebration with food and drink specials and live music.

Z’Tejas opened on Sixth Street in 1989 (with Jack Gilmore of Jack Allen’s Kitchen as its founding chef). It expanded to multiple locations in Austin and Arizona but now has two locations in Arizona and two in Austin. The Avery Ranch restaurant is replacing the Arboretum location which closed in July 2021.

Austin-based Ukranian Baker Shares Recipes with New York Times

Austin-based baker Olga Koutseridi shared recipes and memories from her childhood in Mariupol, Ukraine in a profile in the New York Times. Koutseridi, a graduate student advisor at the University of Texas at Austin, is compiling a database of recipes she fears might be lost forever due to the war with Russia, and shared three of those recipes with the Times: chebureki (meat-filled turnovers), ryazhanka (a toasted milk drink), and her mother’s borsch with fish.

Argus Cidery resumes production

Austin’s first cidery, Argus Cidery, has returned to supermarket shelves after a two-year hiatus. The cidery was formerly in the Fitzhugh area, in a spot that has now been taken over by Texas AVA tasting room, but now shares production facilities with Thirsty Planet on South Congress. It’s signature Apple Bomb cider can be found year-round with quarterly seasonal releases.