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In a place where history is transient, West Alabama Ice House manages to straddle the past and the present like a comfortable mainstay, cold beer at the ready for old-timers and first-timers alike. Opened in 1928 as an actual ice house, selling blocks of the cold stuff for home refrigerators, the place quickly became a fixture of a neighborhood that hasn’t stopped changing for 88 years. Ice soon took a backseat to ice-cold beers and the news of the day. Since they had so much to offer and drew such a large share of the community to their doors, ice houses took hold as a sort of community center for South Texas residents. As the surrounding area changed from country farm homes to streetcar suburb to hippie commune to LGBTQ bastion to the hodgepodge that it is today, other Texas ice houses have disappeared, but West Alabama Ice House has been a constant. Eventually ice houses started selling other goods, becoming something of a precursor to the modern gas station and convenience store.
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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.
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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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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.
Big cigars, big hats and even bigger personalities are a common theme among many of the Ice House's longtime regulars, all doing their part to keep the “Bigger in Texas” tagline alive. There's more to Houston than barbecue and beer (though we've got plenty of that too...). Nicholas L. Hall is a husband and father who earns his keep playing a video game that controls the U.S. power grid. He also writes about food, booze and music, in an attempt to keep the demons at bay. When he's not busy keeping your lights on, he can usually be found making various messes in the kitchen, with apologies to his wife Lori, his daughters Cecilia and Juliette, and his son Joshua. With Houston’s indoor smoking ban in effect, places like the West Alabama Ice House are the last bastion for folks looking for beer and a cigarette.
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You can always hang out and there will be friendly people to meet.” Or it could be an inherent openness to change that’s made it last. This cast of characters has shifted with the neighborhood surrounding the Ice House, skewing younger and more clean-cut than it once did. You can see that in the coolers, which once housed only Lone Star and the usual big beer suspects. Now, a locally brewed IPA seems like a natural fit next to an iced bucket of Bud Light. Some folks come to the Ice House for community, and some come to enjoy a solitary hour (or two) of people-watching at one of the city's oldest institutions. Drinking an iced longneck from the coolers at the West Alabama Ice House is like drinking Houston history.
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The 25 top bars and places to grab a drink in the Houston area - Houston Chronicle
The 25 top bars and places to grab a drink in the Houston area.
Posted: Thu, 06 Oct 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]
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Dogs, which are allowed to roam, are abundant and always eager for attention. Although the Ice House serves wine, you'll notice that everyone is drinking beer. Go for a cheap Lone Star tallboy or peruse the chalkboard menu of local and Texas craft beers, IPAs, and ciders. Multi-generational drinking is the order of the day at the West Alabama Ice House. While the old timers seem permanently perched on the stools lining the bar, the younger crowd tends to congregate around back watching friends shoot hoops or waiting for their turn at a game of Cornhole. Where did icehouses come from, why have they been so beloved in Texas, and what do they look like today?
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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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They chase down your basketball when an errant shot sends it off the backboard, bouncing between the rows of picnic tables that line the rambling backyard. They are cooed at by small children brought along by their parents on sunny days. The dogs are a permanent fixture at a bar defined both by its permanence and its mutability. The icehouse’s classic function as a community gathering place hasn’t lessened with time. The heart-of-the-neighborhood nature of the icehouse dates back to the early years, when folks would head to the icehouse to grab ice and pick up some groceries, often staying awhile. This modern incarnation of the Houston dive bar has been owned by the Markantonis family since 1986, first by patriarch Jerry before passing ownership to son Petros.
The fact that icehouses are generally independently-owned also helps them directly contribute to their communities’ success. "Being a patron helps to keep dollars local and helps promote a sense of community,” explains chef and restaurateur Daniel Wolfe of City Cellars and Wolfe & Wine in Houston. Icehouses also functioned as defacto convenience stores where locals could get some simple grocery items (and other grab-and-go products like takeout beer and cigarettes). “Because the icehouse always had the ice, it made sense for them to carry other perishable goods that required refrigeration, such as milk and eggs.
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.
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.
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.
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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