If you have lived off Burnet for any length of time, you have watched the stretch between Koenig and Anderson do something specific over the last decade. Coffee moved in. The old glass shop turned into overflow parking for a fusion restaurant. Ice cream became a category. What did not really happen, at least not with any consistency, was a proper evening scene. Burnet was where you ran errands and grabbed a slice, then drove somewhere else if you wanted a cocktail after nine.
That has shifted, quietly, in the last eight months. And the shift is worth understanding on its own terms if you already live here, because the tempo of your Friday nights has more options in walking distance than it did a year ago.
What actually opened at 7001 Burnet
The single biggest change is a two-address project from Carrier5 Hospitality that landed on November 13, 2025. Mama Betty's, by Carrier5 Hospitality, opened at 7001 Burnet Road, No. 1101, with Foxtail next door. The Tex-Mex side is a second location for a restaurant that has been running on Parmer Lane since 2022. The lounge next door is new.
A few specifics worth holding onto:
- The Burnet Mama Betty's is not a scaled-down franchise version. The location spans more than 7,600 square feet, with bars inside and outside, a private dining space, and an outdoor patio and lawn.
- Regulars from the Parmer location will recognize the menu. House favorites include mesquite-grilled fajitas, Pechuga Navigation (chicken breast with mushrooms and gravy), Suizas de Sandra Enchiladas, and a Diablo shrimp quesadilla.
- Happy hour runs 3 to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, with $7 frozen margaritas and half-price appetizers.
Foxtail is the interesting one. It shares a wall with Mama Betty's but almost nothing else. It seats 58 (Mama Betty's seats 228), with a smaller sharable food menu that is not tied to Tex-Mex. The interior layers old-world textures with modern polish: velvet banquettes, warm brass lighting, smoked mirrors, deep walnut tones, and a curated vinyl soundtrack. Signature drinks include the Ristretto Martini, the Kitsune (an old-fashioned built on Suntory Toki Whisky, honey and bitters), and the Foxolada, a coconut-forward riff on the piña colada dusted with nutmeg.
Two operating details that matter if you are a neighbor:
- Foxtail is open 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Wednesday and Sunday, 3 p.m. to midnight Thursday, and 3 p.m. to 1 a.m. Friday and Saturday. That is a real late-night option inside the neighborhood boundary.
- Thursday is jazz night, and it gets loud near the stage — regulars ask for a table farther back if they want to talk over drinks.
The Mama Betty's + Foxtail pairing is the first time a full-service Tex-Mex room and a cocktail-only lounge have opened as intentionally connected concepts on this stretch of Burnet. That is the news. What it means for you is that the space between dinner and last call no longer requires a car trip.
A walking loop that still works
The temptation with a new restaurant opening is to write over the rest of the neighborhood. Resist. The reason 7001 Burnet works is because the block around it already had gravity.
Start at the Crestview Shopping Center at 7100 Woodrow Avenue. The center anchors a neighborhood grocery store, Little Deli Pizzeria, and a barbershop. Little Deli is one of the few pizza counters in Central Austin where you can watch the same slice-makers work a Friday-night line year after year, and where you will almost always run into someone from your block.
The wall behind the shopping center is worth a slow walk. In 2003, Brentwood artist Jean Graham shared her vision for a mosaic Wall of Welcome, a 120-foot brick wall at 7100 Woodrow Avenue at Crestview Shopping Center, covered in designs that preserve some of the neighborhood's history. The mosaic was a genuine neighborhood project: Voices of the Violet Crown grew out of that fundraising effort, and Violet Crown Community Works was created in 2003 to help build and sustain community through neighborhood enhancement projects, beginning with the Wall of Welcome.
From there, the walkable food loop looks something like this:
- 5520 Burnet Rd, Suite 100. The Peached Tortilla, an Asian fusion restaurant with Chinese, Japanese, and Malaysian influences, sits at the seam between Allandale, Rosedale, Brentwood, and Crestview, with a menu that includes BBQ brisket and banh mi tacos, the JapaJam burger, kimchi arancini balls, and dan dan noodles. Weekly specials rotate: Steak & Frites on Tuesday, Fried Chicken & Whiskey on Wednesday, Ramen on Thursday.
- Black Star Co-op for a pet-friendly pint. It is the neighborhood's cooperatively run pub and brewery.
- Lick Honest Ice Creams for the walk home. Lick is one of the small handful of scratch-made ice cream counters within Crestview and Brentwood's boundaries.
None of those places are new. That is the point. The reason a Thursday-night crawl feels different this year is not that everything changed, but that Foxtail plugged the one gap the corridor kept having.
The gluten-free bakery most people missed
One easy-to-miss recent addition is worth flagging for anyone who has been priced out of the daytime bakery options downtown. A gluten-free bakery that operated out of farmers markets for a few years found its permanent home on Burnet Road, with cookies, cakes, donuts, and a full coffee bar. This is exactly the kind of business that gets absorbed into a family's routine within a month and then quietly disappears from your mental map of "new" places.
What summer looks like outside
The Burnet corridor has a specific outdoor rhythm that maps to a single park. Brentwood Neighborhood Park sits at 6710 Arroyo Seco, 78757. It is the pivot for most community events in Brentwood and Crestview.
The clearest example is the annual festival. Violet Crown Festival returned to Brentwood Park on Saturday, May 2, 2026. The 2026 lineup included live music headlined by Dale Watson, an amateur BBQ brisket cook-off, local artist vendors, kids' activities, and food from vendors including Roppolo's Pizza and KG BBQ. Proceeds go to park improvements, and the festival maintains a running tribute to Domino, the area's mascot, a potbellied pig who once roamed freely through the neighborhood.
The festival is a spring event, so if you missed it in May, you are looking at next spring for the full production. But the park itself runs summer programming through the neighborhood associations, and it is the shortest walk from the Woodrow-Justin corner to actually feel like you live in a place with its own gravitational center.
If your household has kids and you have not yet made the connection: the same volunteer network that runs Violet Crown Festival also produced the Wall of Welcome, planted 115 street trees in 2011, and maintains the local history archives. That is not marketing copy. That is why the neighborhood associations are worth showing up to, once.
How the new evening layer changes your week
Here is the observation worth taking home. The Burnet corridor in Brentwood and Crestview has had a strong daytime identity for years: coffee, bagels, hardware, groceries, a slice, a walk. What it did not have was a way to keep you on the corridor past 9 p.m. on a night that was not a game night at Black Star.
The Foxtail opening changed that math for two reasons. First, it is a purpose-built cocktail room, not a restaurant bar tacked onto a dinner service. Second, it shares a parking lot with a 228-seat Tex-Mex kitchen open until 11 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, which means a full evening now fits inside one block. That is not the case at any other intersection in 78757.
If you have been in the neighborhood for a while, the practical question is whether to change any of your defaults. A reasonable answer:
- Keep Little Deli as your standing pizza night. Nothing has replaced it.
- Try Foxtail on a Tuesday or Wednesday before you try it on a Thursday. Earlier weekday hours are quieter, and the room is easier to appreciate before jazz starts.
- Save Mama Betty's happy hour for the shoulder time between school pickup and the dinner rush.
- Walk the Wall of Welcome once with someone who has not seen it. It reads differently in person than any photo of it.
None of this requires you to reorder your life. It just means the map of your own neighborhood has more useful pins on it than it did last summer.
If you have thoughts about how the changes on Burnet are showing up in your day-to-day, or if you are curious how they are showing up in Brentwood/Crestview home values, Levack Living is happy to talk through any of it. Schedule a personal market consultation whenever it fits your week.
