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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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We have a pool table, a ping pong table, corn hole, and ring on a string! Anyone under 21 must be accompanied by a parent or guardian and should leave at sun down. There's no food, but the acclaimed Tacos Tierra Caliente food truck is right across the street. More so than many other large cities, Houston is in a constant state of flux. This makes it an exciting and dynamic place to live, eat and drink, but it also means that history is hard to come by. We’re more likely to redevelop than refurbish, more likely to look forward than back.
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Functioning as a sort of communal living room for the neighborhood, an evening (or an early afternoon—the Ice House starts up early) spent here is like a time-lapse view of what it means to live in Houston. A taco truck parked across the street slings lengua tacos with fiery salsa, while a rotating cast out front might offer Tex-Cajun smoked boudin or boiled crawfish. Obviously, icehouse visitors don’t need giant blocks of ice for refrigeration purposes anymore, but they still love the warm, unpretentious vibe of these outdoor gathering places.
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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.
Whether you’re visiting Houston or a local, our staff welcome you with open arms. We guarantee you won’t find a better atmosphere than here with us. With nightly entertainment, games, huge events, high-quality local and international cuisines, a huge variety of drinks and so much more!
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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.
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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.
What Exactly Is A Texas Icehouse?
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.
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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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.
Sandwich joints are plopped in the middle of residential neighborhoods, and for some reason there are three separate Starbucks on one street corner. But the best thing about this weird little slice of Houston is the sprawling outdoor bar that sits between a convenience store and a fitness center on West Alabama Street. The West Alabama Ice House embodies the odd anything-goes ethos of Montrose. Named, "the coolest place in Texas," and one of the top 100 places to visit in Texas by Saveur Magazine. 80 years old as of 2008, this building is a true open air, Texas icehouse. But perhaps this icehouse has stuck around because, as current owner Pete Markantonis explains, “it doesn’t matter how you look or how you dress or where you come from.
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?
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.
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.
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.
She's an avid home chef who's always eager to try new recipes, and she's constantly inspired by the culinary traditions of the exciting city of Austin, which she calls home. As the most discerning, up-to-the-minute voice in all things travel, Condé Nast Traveler is the global citizen’s bible and muse, offering both inspiration and vital intel. We understand that time is the greatest luxury, which is why Condé Nast Traveler mines its network of experts and influencers so that you never waste a meal, a drink, or a hotel stay wherever you are in the world. With a boisterous, casual, anything-goes crowd, the Ice House is great for large groups, especially of if you're looking to watch a game. Everyone in Houston is proud to bring out-of-town friends to this institution. Our guide to the best Happy Hour food and drink specials around the city.
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