GROUNDBREAKING AUSTIN BUTCHER SHOP AND RESTAURANT SALT & TIME IS CLOSING

A longtime and very important Austin restaurant and butcher shop is going to close this year. Salt & Time at 1912 East Seventh Street will have its last day of service in the Blackshear-Prospect Hill neighborhood on Saturday, July 6. Salt & Time Wine Shop — also at the same address — has already closed on June 20.

The East Seventh Street business will be replaced by a new yet similar butcher shop/market with the same ethos as Salt: Radius Butcher & Grocery, which will open in late 2024.

Radius’s butcher shop will offer meats that are local and pastured, sourced from farms that focus on implementing regenerative methods. They’ll use some of the same Salt & Time vendors, including South Texas ranch Peaceful Pork, Elgin farm Greener Pastures Chicken, and Austin-based distributor Farm to Table TX. The market will sell produce, eggs, grains, cheeses, and Gulf seafood, all in the sustainable, local, and organic veins. And then it’ll also stock sauces and spices from Austin restaurants and elsewhere. There will be no restaurant component.

Running Radius are Kevin Fishner and Joe Saenz. Founder and owner Fishner worked in various roles in the software industry. Saenz, who is from San Antonio, will function as Radius’s general manager and head butcher. He has worked at various restaurants and butcher shops in Texas and New York, such as Brooklyn grocery store and market Marlow & Daughters, Manhattan butchery and sandwich shop Ends Meat, Brooklyn butcher shop the Meat Hook, now-closed San Antonio butcher shop and restaurant Swine House, and Wurst Behavior.

In a press release, Fishner says, “Salt & Time has been a pillar of the Austin farm-to-table community for over a decade, and we hope to honor and extend that legacy.” He notes that Salt co-owners and co-founders Ben Runkle and Bryan Butler have been helping the change from Salt to Radius.

Also in the same release, Runkle shares that Salt’s team worked to get jobs for its staffers, adding that “our butchery staff will have the opportunity to continue serving East Austin as part of the Radius team.”

Runkle tells Eater that they decided to shut down the restaurant for “lots of different reasons, some financial, some personal, but we felt like this was a great opportunity to exit gracefully,” he writes. “It means a lot to me and Bryan that the space will continue on as a butcher shop.

According to Radius’s newsletter sent out in October 2023, they plan on ideally opening additional locations in the city. When Radius opens, its hours will be from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day.

Salt & Time opened in 2013, one of the first Austin restaurants to really hone in on local meats butchered in-house. There was supposed to be an expansion to the now-failed St. Elmo Public Market but that obviously never panned out. There had been the downtown cafe which ran from 2020 to 2022. The duo opened a wine shop and bar two doors down in 2020. And there had been plans to open a burger restaurant, which didn’t come into fruition. Also remember when Texas actor Jesse Plemons shadowed the Salt & Time butcher team to learn how to cut meats properly for his role on Fargo that season?

Runkle is also part of the Present Tense Hospitality group, which oversees Rosen’s downtown cafe (which took over that same Salt & Time cafe location), Dovetail Pizza, and the forthcoming relaunch of Indian restaurant G’Raj Mahal.

Update, July 1.: This article, originally published on June 6., has been update to include clarification on Radius’s opening timeline, the fact that it won’t include a restaurant component, that Salt & Time Wine is also closing and its last day of service.

2024-06-06T17:42:06Z dg43tfdfdgfd