Austin Restaurant Second Bar’s Expanding Up North Into Mineral Wells, Texas

Austin restaurant Second Bar + Kitchen is opening another new location this year. The New American restaurant will open up in Mineral Wells, Texas within the Crazy Water Hotel in the summer of 2023.

The expansion makes sense seeing that the restaurant’s parent company La Corsha Hospitality Group is partnered with the hotel. La Corsha regional vice president and executive chef David Bull actually moved up to Mineral Wells.

Second Bar’s Mineral Wells menu will include familiar dishes such as the black truffle pomme frites, pastas, and more, plus vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, and dairy-free options. Cocktails will include items made with the hotel’s bottled water brand Crazy Water, which makes use of the town’s famous mineral water, as well as an array of non-alcoholic drinks.

The restaurant space will also host to-be-announced pop-up dinners on Thursdays. It plans on being open Friday through Sunday for brunch and dinner.

The hotel opened in 1912 on top of an actual mineral water well. The building was destroyed in a fire in 1925, was rebuilt in 1927, and then underwent renovations in 2018 courtesy of La Corsha.

Crazy Water Hotel

Bull opened his first Austin restaurants — fine dining spot Congress, Bar Congress, and Second Bar + Kitchen — in downtown Austin along the same block in 2010. He closed Bar Congress and Congress in 2015 and turned that space over into an expansion for Second Bar, which debuted in 2017. In the meantime, the restaurant expanded into the Domain Northside inside of the Archer Hotel in 2016, into the Austin Bergstrom-International Airport in 2017, and into the East Austin Hotel in 2022. La Corsha closed the original Second Bar in 2020, declining to renew the lease, and the Domain Northside one in late 2022. This Mineral Springs location marks the third existing location of Second Bar.

La Corsha also opened the sprawling downtown restaurant Boiler Nine Bar + Grill, which ran from 2016 to 2019, and renovated and revamped the historic Green Pastures and its on-site restaurant into Mattie’s in 2017.

And similarly to Crazy Water Hotel, the company is working on or has worked on renovations for other Texas hotels such as Hotel Settles in Big Spring, Texas, Mineral Wells’s Baker Hotel & Spa, and Hotel Saint George in Marfa.