If you told a friend to meet you "at the rooftop on Austin Avenue" a year ago, there was no ambiguity. You meant the Hippodrome. Now that sentence needs a follow-up question, because the Hippodrome itself has quietly split into three different nights out, and picking the wrong floor means showing up dressed for the wrong one.
This is the part of downtown Waco that changes fastest and gets talked about the least precisely. Everyone knows there are rooftop bars downtown. Fewer people have clocked that the building most of us default to has grown an entire street-level layer this summer, that a second building has been sitting empty on a prominent corner for the better part of a year and finally has a tenant lined up, and that the three established rooftops downtown are not interchangeable in the way a quick recommendation makes them sound.
The Building That Grew a Third Floor
Encore Rooftop Kitchen & Spirits sits atop the Waco Hippodrome at 724 Austin Avenue, and for a while it was exactly what the name suggests: a rooftop bar with a view, reached by a climb up creaky stairs through a building that still looks like it could hide the Phantom of the Opera. Last fall, the operation expanded down to the second floor, adding a full restaurant overseen by Chef Richard "Cayman" Colunga, who came over from 135 Prime steakhouse. Colunga runs the kitchen alongside business partner Justin Blalock, who also owns Uncle Worm's Texas Cuisine on North 19th Street.
That would have been the whole story a year ago. It isn't anymore. Encore's own site now describes a build-out spanning all three floors of the building, with a street-level concept from Colunga set to open this summer. The site's language is specific about the sequence: start at street level, work your way up, end under the stars on the roof. That's not a metaphor. It's the actual physical path through the building now, from a ground-floor dining room to a second-floor kitchen to a rooftop bar pouring twelve different drinks across the three levels.
The practical effect is that "Encore" no longer describes one experience. It describes three, stacked on top of each other, each with a different mood and presumably a different wait. A Wednesday dinner reservation at the second-floor restaurant and a Friday night walk-up to the rooftop bar are not the same plan, even though they share an address and a chef.
Three Rooftops, Three Very Different Nights
Encore is not downtown's only rooftop, and the other two have never really competed with it for the same night out. They occupy different corners of the same evening.
| Spot | Where | View | Feel |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lucky Buck's Rooftop Bar | Hotel Herringbone, 319 S. 4th St. | 360-degree views of the Magnolia Silos and the Brazos | Casual, described by its own menu as a rooftop dive, hand-tossed pizza and frozen drinks, boots-up energy |
| Bertie's on the Rooftop | Hotel 1928 | The Alico building and downtown skyline | Seasonal Southern dishes, a slower dinner-and-drinks pace built for a date night or a girls' night out |
| Encore Rooftop Kitchen & Spirits | The Hippodrome, 724 Austin Ave. | Panoramic downtown views | Craft cocktails and live music on the roof, now backed by a full restaurant one floor down and a street-level room below that |
Lucky Buck's is the one where nobody dresses up. It's four floors above Hotel Herringbone, and the whole pitch is a leather couch, a cold beer, and a view of the Silos that doesn't ask anything of you. Bertie's, at Hotel 1928, is the opposite instinct: a rooftop built around a proper Southern dinner and a view of the Alico building rather than a party. Encore sits between the two, and now literally contains both registers in one building depending on which floor you're standing on.
The mistake locals make is treating these three as fungible, like any rooftop will do for any occasion. They're not built that way. A Tuesday unwind calls for Lucky Buck's. A dinner that's actually about the dinner calls for Bertie's or Encore's second floor. A rooftop-only, drinks-and-a-view kind of night still belongs on top of the Hippodrome, but now you have to specify you mean the roof and not the restaurant beneath it.
The Corner That's Finally Getting a Tenant
A block over, at Fourth Street and Austin Avenue, the former Coach's XXX Smoke Barbecue space sat empty long enough to become part of the mental furniture of a downtown walk. The last confirmed word, reported by the Waco Tribune about a year ago, was that a Houston-based hospitality group under the Landmark Hospitality umbrella had acquired the space for a Hearsay Gastro Lounge, with dining and live music planned. Landmark has a track record of taking on vacancies in established parts of cities and designing around what's already there rather than starting from scratch.
No opening date came with that announcement, and there's no newer word on where the buildout stands now. The question worth watching, if you walk that stretch of Austin Avenue regularly, is whether the space finally comes alive this fall. Combined with Encore's expansion two blocks up, that corner and the Hippodrome together would make the short walk from Fourth Street to Austin Avenue the most concentrated stretch of new downtown dining and drinking Waco has seen in a while.
Picking the Right Floor for the Right Night
The old shorthand for a downtown Waco night out was simple: pick a rooftop, go up, order a drink. That still works if all you want is a rooftop. But the more interesting shift this year isn't that downtown added a bar. It's that the buildings themselves stopped being single-purpose. The Hippodrome now asks you to choose a floor before you choose a table. The corner at Fourth and Austin, empty for so long it barely registered anymore, will likely ask something similar once Hearsay actually opens its doors.
None of this changes where you'd send an out-of-town guest for a quick rooftop photo. It does change what you tell a friend when they ask where to go on a Thursday versus a Saturday versus a date night. The honest answer now has three parts instead of one, and knowing which part to give is the difference between a good recommendation and a vague one.
If you're the kind of Waco resident who tracks this stuff, downtown is worth a slow walk before the fall crowds pick back up, if only to see which floor of the Hippodrome has its lights on this week.
Want more updates like this on what's actually changing in Waco, from downtown to the neighborhoods around it? Vianey Suarez keeps a close eye on the city she works in, and she's always glad to talk Waco, whether or not real estate is anywhere on your mind yet.
