Coffee Shop and Bar Buzz Mill Opens on East Seventh With Vegan Brunch Restaurant

Austin coffee shop and bar Buzz Mill opened a new location in East Austin this fall. Buzz Mill East Side took over the space that previously belonged to bar and burrito restaurant Troublemaker/New American restaurant Hightower at 1209 East Seventh Street as of mid-September.

Buzz Mill East Side operates similarly to the original location on East Riverside Drive. There are beers, cocktails, infused spirits, and coffee. The cafe is also the new home of vegan breakfast and brunch restaurant Brunch Bird. The restaurant actually relocated from its original spot within South Austin shop River City Market.

Unlike Buzz Mill Riverside, the East Austin location isn’t open 24/7. Rather, its hours are from 7 a.m. to midnight daily. Brunch Bird serves food from 8 a.m. to midnight daily. There are both indoor and outdoor dine-in areas.

This isn’t Buzz Mill’s first time in the East Austin area north of the river. It opened a location in Govalle in October 2019, aka Buzz Mill Shady, which closed in April 2020 due to the pandemic. There was also that intended South Congress location for 2016 that never opened (the build-out eventually became Cosmic Coffee + Beer Garden in 2017). The original Riverside Buzz Mill opened in 2013.

The East Seventh address was home to co-owners Chad Dolezal and general manager Victor Farnsworth’s casual New American restaurant the Hightower, which took over the former Karibu Ethiopian restaurant in 2014. They closed in September 2019 and turned the space into Troublemaker, a bar, record shop, and San Diego burrito shop, that November. Seven months later, they closed the bar because of the pandemic.

• All Coverage of Buzz Mill [EATX]