About this tour
San Antonio's downtown core holds one of the densest clusters of century-old restaurants and bars in Texas, most of them within a few blocks of the River Walk and Alamo Plaza. This tour gathers the survivors: a 1917 German deli that outlasted the neighborhood around it, the first restaurant to ever open on the River Walk, the bar with the longest wooden counter in the state, the saloon where Teddy Roosevelt recruited the Rough Riders, the sprawling 24-hour institution at Market Square, and — a short drive north — the city's oldest Mexican restaurant. This isn't about trends; every stop here has been serving the same neighborhood, more or less the same way, for the better part of a century.