Highly Praised New York City Bar the Dead Rabbit Will Open in Austin

Highly acclaimed New York City bar the Dead Rabbit is going to open an Austin location next year. It’ll open at 204 East Sixth Street in the downtown area, taking over the former B.D. Riley’s original location, starting sometime in the spring of 2023.

The award-winning bar is known for its Irish pub sensibilities, from its array of Irish whiskeys to the famed Irish coffees to an Irish/English food menu with Scotch eggs, fish and chips, corned beef sandwiches, and Irish breakfasts. Co-founders Sean Muldoon and Jack McGarry, who hail from Belfast, Ireland, opened the original New York bar in 2013. The New York location even carries Austin Eastciders.

The Austin Dead Rabbit will fill the space left by local Irish bar B.D. Riley’s downtown location, which opened in 2000 and expanded with a Mueller location in 2017. Ultimately partners in the business decided to not renew the downtown lease in 2020, due to the pandemic’s heavy impact on foot traffic.

Dead Rabbit is also opening another location in New Orleans next year. The New York Times reports that McGarry will focus on Dead Rabbit as its only managing partner. Separately, Muldoon left Dead Rabbit, and he and the bar’s former beverage director Jillian Vose are opening their own bar in Charleston, Hazel and Apple, later in 2022.

There was that whole thing where another important New York City bar was supposed to open in Austin, Employees Only, announced back in 2016, but that seemingly never came to fruition.

Update, 3:37 p.m.: This article, originally published at 10:20 a.m., has been updated to clarify that Hazel and Apple is not part of Dead Rabbit.