The owners are different, but the venue will be much of the same for the legendary cafe that characterized Austin in the 1950s and 1960s. As most people in town are aware, Bob Cole, a well-known local radio personality, has teamed with Steve Cartwright, a bar-b-cue restaurant owner in Bastrop and Elgin, for the project. Hill's Cafe had opened in 1947 and closed its doors in 1988 at the height of the state's downturn.
Work has been under way since June, when the Goodnight family had inked a 20-year lease for the 10,000-sf building with Cole and Cartwright. "We really felt they had an understanding of Austin and what made the restaurant unique," Dean Goodnight tells GlobeSt.com. "We really hope to maintain this as an Austin original."
Through the years, the building has had several uses and several offers, says the owner of Goodnight Properties, which also maintains its office in the structure. For years, a catering business continued to use the kitchen for off-premises catering trucks for construction sites.
"We never did put it on the market to sell and never intended for it to be reopened as Hill's," Goodnight tells GlobeSt.com. "It's a tribute to the relations we built with (KVET radio personality) Bob Cole and his partners that we were comfortable with the idea of opening it under the Hill's Café name after all of these years." Some of the rejected ideas have been a nightclub, dancehall and even another eatery. One serious suitor had wanted to turn the building into office space with a Western motif. But the Goodnight family hesitated to turn over the restaurant, which anchors a 14-acre family-owned tract in South Austin.
Hill's Cafe had been ranked as one of the busiest independent restaurants in the country. Sam "Posey" Hill and Merle Goodnight had opened the eatery in 1947. At the height of its popularity, Hill's Cafe had employed more than 200 people and had been consider south Austin's largest employer.
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