Steiner Ranch

Something's going, I don't know, we're just going to hold off.

I'm Nichelle Bielinski and I live in Steiner Ranch.

We smelled the smoke and the wind was blowing and we have a topiary urn that's on the front porch.

It fell over.

I am Jim Lenardos.

I'm the fire chief at Lake Travis Fire Rescue.

Bottom line was we knew from the beginning it was going into Steiner Ranch and we knew it was going to be a bad scenario.

And from there we started to develop a very, very large game plan, if you will, on what was gonna happen if this fire hit the backside of Stowner Ranch, which in fact it did.

That place was fucking great.

Oh, you know what was kind of the best meal of the whole tour, Marcus missed it unfortunately, was, uh, Steiner Ranch.

Oh, yeah.

Ah, yes.

That we woke up, well, we had to deal with some incredible wildfires.

Remember the stories about Steiner Ranch? Took hours for people to evacuate some of those areas.

Bastrop County had a massive deadly fire as well.

And, well, it's still etched into our memory, of course.

tinderbox out there across Texas.

It is.

In fact, they had a press conference, Austin and Travis County officials yesterday, and one of the officials there, I can't remember who he was with, but he said that Conditions right now here in Central Texas are very similar to what they were 15 years ago when we had that fire in Steiner Ranch and Bastrop and Spicewood.

A bunch of homes burned up too.

I mean, it's a killer smash burger, and I would highly recommend it.

I just wanna throw one honorable mention out there before I wrap this first Austin restaurants episode up, and that is Steiner Ranch.

Steiner Ranch is in Northwest Austin.

I guess technically it's still Austin.

It's about a 30-minute drive outside of the city center, and it is an amazing steakhouse, but I've never been there for dinner.