On this trip to Austin, I arrived in the early hours of the morning and felt very tired the following day. I had no car and neither fancied eating in the hotel nor taking a walk to the downtown area in the heat. I therefore took the boring choice of looking round the block. Zax was a few hundred metres away on Barton Springs
Zax has a "shed-like" construction that is very common with microbreweries in the US; though it is not a microbrewery. The construction is not unattractive inside and the bar is light and the furniture modern. The wooden construction means that inside is quite noisy. There is a shaded courtyard area about six by twenty metres in size too.
In the mid 1980s when I made my first trips to the US, I generally found that beer tasted so awful that I never ordered it. The microbrewing movement has been a great success with the result that these days there if often a great choice of brews - many local. Zax had a wide selection of beers on draft and an even bigger choice of bottled beer.
The lunch menu was mainly pizza and pasta. I went for a pizza with pepperoni, sausage and caremelised onions. The US is the home of the heavily laden deep pan pizza which in my view is often overloaded with toppings and has a soggy base. The original italian pizza was poor people's food but the Americans certainly made it into a meal. I have had pizza meals in Tuscany which were a delight. The dough was almost baked crisp and was very thin the toppings were tasty (I recall wild boar salami) but relatively sparse.
Zax pizza was a pleasant surprise. The base was thin and cooked until slightly crisp, there was no tomato & cheese gloop but exactly what I ordered on top.
Just before I left I noticed that a lot of people were ordering cocktails served from the jar shown above. I asked what it was and was told it was a jar or chillies, garlic and sundried tomatoes filled with vodka. It looked interesting but since I had already settled up I did not try it.
kendersrule
Pro 
As if vodka didn't taste strong enough!