Texas Tavern — Mid City Food Icon

Texas Tavern opened in 1940 on Government Street in Mid City and never left. It is the oldest continuously operating bar in Baton Rouge. Generations of the same families have sat in the same booths for over 80 years — before the interstate system, before suburban flight, before the restaurant boom that turned other corners of the city into something unrecognizable. This is a cash bar. No reservations. Open late. Mid City has been remade around it more than once, and Texas Tavern is still there, unchanged, a fixed point in a neighborhood that has outlasted every redevelopment cycle and demographic shift thrown at it. If you want to understand what Mid City was before it became what it is now, you go to Texas Tavern and sit in a booth that someone's grandfather claimed in 1955 and find out what survives.