The Salt Lick – Austin, TX

The Salt Lick in Austin, Texas – where to go for down home, Texan BBQ.

When I found out that I was going to be headed to Austin, and when I told my husband that I wanted him to meet me there for an extended trip, the first thing he said was that he wanted to go to The Salt Lick. He had heard about this bbq joint while watching The Travel Channel, and it must have stuck with him enough that The Salt Lick was the first thing he thought about when he heard Austin!!

You do need a car if you are planning on going to The Salt Lick, which was ok because we had decided to rent a car for our trip. When my husband arrived in Austin and picked me up, we decided to head to The Salt Lick for lunch before we could check into our hotel. It was a little bit of a drive, but not too far – probably about a 40 minute drive. We were there late afternoon, so it wasn’t very busy. We only had to wait about 5-10 minutes for a table. We had looked online at the menu and both already knew that we wanted to do the all you can eat family style for $21.95 a person. Not bad for a whole bunch of meat!!

The family style platter comes with beef brisket (you choose if you want lean, juicy or burnt ends – we chose burnt ends), pork ribs and sausage. The ribs were really good. We polished them off pretty quickly and asked for more. I’m pretty sure the second plate they brought were beef ribs instead of pork, and we didn’t like those quite as much as the pork. The sausage was outstanding, but the stand out was the brisket. Seriously melt in your mouth good. We would have eaten plates of it if our bellies would have let us!!

From reading reviews before we went, some people said the sides weren’t that great, but I’m actually not a coleslaw lover and I liked their coleslaw. It was simple and light and I definitely ate my fair share of it. The potato salad and beans were fine, but honestly, we were just too busy with the meat!!

I wish we would have saved room for dessert (I really wanted to try the cobbler), but alas, we were stuffed and just couldn’t do it. My husband is the hard one to impress when it comes to bbq, but even weeks later, he is still talking about that brisket. I think that shows just how much he loved it!!

As a side note, the Salt Lick only takes cash, although they do have an atm. But remember to hit the bank before you go if you want to avoid atm charges.

We ate at the Driftwood location, which is the original location, but we also had some more at the airport before we flew out of Austin. While the airport location was good, I would definitely recommend heading to the Driftwood location if you want a true Texas BBQ experience!

The Salt Lick
18300 FM 1826
Driftwood, TX 78619
www.saltlickbbq.com