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Located on the west end of Alabama Street, West Alabama Ice House has been serving cold beer to the Montrose masses since 1928. In true Texas ice house style, West Alabama is essentially a tiny shack consisting of mostly beer coolers as well as a small bar surrounded by massive covered and uncovered patios (that means no air conditioning, y’all) with space for a couple hundred people. Most days, folks here are kicking back with Lone Star tallboys while their dog laps up water from a beer bucket, watching sports on one of the many screens, or having a few tacos from Tacos Tierra Caliente, a food truck next door. We love to roll up here solo for Monday Happy Hour, with a big group for a weekend pre-game, or to play a couple rounds of corn hole and shoot some pool. Operating since the 1920s, this used to be a place where locals picked up hunks of ice to help them stay cool during Houston’s torturous summers. Along the way, someone added a few picnic tables to the open-air spot, and it became a place to stop in for a beer.
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The Markantonis family tradition continues with two of Pete's daughters, who also work there. In back, a wide, open space filled with yet more picnic tables and typical bar games like giant Jenga feels a bit more lawless, ample nooks and crannies available to sequester groups even on busy days. A back door connected to the main West Alabama Ice House structure opens out onto this back area, serving as a portal to a tiny room part of the main structure itself that houses the Houston dive bar’s pool table. A few dive bar-style framed photos can be found in this forgotten corner of West Alabama Ice House, including a photo of patriarch Jerry Markantonis, signed by a number of regulars at the time. The structure at the center of the ice house complex is deceptively small as a standalone building, the square footage here distributed more liberally across outdoor drinking areas. The street-adjacent front patio is the center of activity most days, picnic table-style seating nestled under a roof that critically blocks out the Texas sun.
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Offerings are fairly standard as far as classic Houston taco truck options, but the quality is outstanding and as a one-two punch, the combination of one of the better street taco outposts in the area and West Alabama Ice House is hard to beat. Local tamale purveyors have been known to wind through the dive bar’s picnic table seating areas as well. The West Alabama Ice House story is similar, founded during the heart of Prohibition so that nearby residents could refill their iceboxes, the now dive bar’s offerings expanded over time. Ice houses as gathering spots date back to the 1920s, before the introduction of modern refrigeration. Initially they purveyed large blocks of ice, typically cut from frozen rivers and lakes in northern states and transported in rail cars insulated with straw or sawdust. Once they arrived at the ice houses in Texas, these blocks were cut down and sold to locals, who used them to keep their cellars full of perishables frigid.
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Fans and misters keep things cool during the summer months, plastic sheeting and space heaters deployed during winter to continue the use of West Alabama Ice House’s outdoor footprint. If you stop off along the Interstate 10 corridor leading from San Antonio to Houston, you may notice a few open-air gathering spots with picnic tables, well-worn wooden buildings, bottled and canned beers, and patrons mixing and mingling. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, “icehouses” first started to pop up in East Texas and along the Texas-Mexico border; and, as their name suggests, they generally served as places to get ice on sweltering days. “Icehouses originally were places with garage doors and no air conditioning [for guests], and they only served beer. Oftentimes, they were also a place where actual ice was made and where people would gather on the weekends to cook with family and friends,” explains Danny Evans, co-founder of Little Woodrow’s and co-owner of Kirby Ice House in Houston. One of the best attributes of West Alabama Ice House sits off premise in the form of Tacos Tierra Caliente, a taco truck parked across the street.
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Of course, serving cold beer was a no-brainer, since people were always coming for other things,” says Morgan Weber, beverage director and co-owner of Eight Row Flint in Houston. The term ‘ice house’ in Texas comes with very specific connotations not always adhered to by the trendy bars and restaurants that sometimes slap the phrase onto a new business. Such is not the case for Houston’s West Alabama ice House, the city’s legit ice house institution first opened in 1928. While changes have certainly swirled around the Montrose staple over the decades, the Houston dive bar’s appeal is very much anchored in the rich history embodied by its hard-earned ice house status. Today you can get a wide variety of tacos—from lengua to barbacoa to chicken, with a variety of sauces to boot—from the Tacos Tierra Caliente food truck or attend one of the many crawfish boils locals throw in their backyards.
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On the weekends, the Ice House is often flanked by motorcycles, as crowds of college kids down buckets of cheap beer in the back, playing games of cornhole or Wallhooky Ring Toss. In a city like Houston, settling on an iconic anything is a somewhat tricky question. Part of the answer lies in those places that somehow manage to feel timeless and contemporary, where the demographic shifts of the city are reflected in the clientele and in the character of the bar, even while the bar stays resolutely itself.
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A regular cast of food trucks rotates through to complement Tacos Tierra Caliente, and on some days locals pass through on foot, selling goods like homemade tamales straight from a cooler. While the core of the place is still a bit rough and tumble, owner Petros Markantonis and his father have spent the better part of three decades refurbishing. A system of misting fans helps keep patrons cool on blisteringly hot summer days. Still, even the new parts feel time-worn, as if the place is immune to real change.
I first visited West Alabama Ice House as a doe-eyed 22-year-old during the welcome week for my two-year stint with Teach for America, and I promptly fell in love. With its inviting picnic tables dotting the front, side, and rear of its sizable lot, “Walabama”—as it’s been dubbed by the regulars—is the place where the Montrose community comes together to socialize. A group of grizzled bikers, their hogs parked outside, sip napkin-wrapped bottles of Shiner and Lone Star along the railing. Polo-clad undergrads shoot hoops out back, and families gather around the picnic tables.
Your furry family members are welcome at these Paws on Patio-approved spots. We provide accommodations for birthday parties, graduations, baby showers, engagements, and weddings! We can reserve seating areas and put messages on the marquee for your event. You can also also have a private bar and bartender in the backyard for an added fee.
In 1927 multiple icehouses in Dallas consolidated into the Southland Ice Company, which began selling items like eggs and milk. The company later changed its name to 7-Eleven, a nod to its expanded hours of operation. They roam amongst the regulars collecting affectionate ear scratches.
We consulted a group of Texan icehouse owners, restaurateurs, and historians to learn about this regional icon’s importance and what makes an icehouse a perfect stop for any Texas road trip, straight from the people who know it best. The beer selection has certainly evolved over the years, expanded now to include an impressively wide array of domestic standards and rotating craft options. This friendly, casual bar—where folks always seem to be in a good mood—draws a cross-section of inner-loop Houston. You'll see lawyers in their 60s, college kids, neighbors from bohemian Montrose, and bikers. There are many reasons why Montrose is my favorite neighborhood in Houston, not least among them are the zoning laws (or lack thereof) that lend it its funky sense of order.
Across the street from the West Alabama Ice House, Tacos Tierra Caliente serves up some of Houston’s favorite tacos (left). Taylor Tobin is a freelance food and lifestyle journalist based in Austin, Texas. She has been covering home cooking and home bartending for over five years, with bylines in publications like Eater, HuffPost, Insider, Allrecipes, Wine Enthusiast, and The Spruce Eats.
Today the dog-friendly ice house also offers wraparound patio seating, Ring-on-a-String, an endless supply of long-necks, and the Tacos Tierra Caliente food truck, making it the perfect Houston hangout. Built in 1928 on a dirt road on the outskirts of town, the West Alabama Ice House is a true Texas ice house. Before the days of air conditioning and refrigeration, people in the south would gather at their local watering hole to hang out with neighbors and drink ice cold beverages. This tradition continues today with a great selection of craft beers, ciders, seltzers, sours, and sodas.In 1985, Jerry Markantonis, a Greek immigrant from the island of Kefalonia, acquired the West Alabama Ice House. His son, Petros (Pete), still maintains and runs the bar to this day.
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