Salt Traders Coastal Cooking — Restaurant in Austin

​update November 2024

Another good meal from the standout Salt Coast Traders at Zilker Park. Service was crisp and attentive, thanks Bing! We started with one dozen gulf oysters, shucked well, served ice cold, delicious. Entrees included shrimp and grits, fried fish and shrimp platter, and a bowl of cioppino. All were served piping hot and very well done! A couple of dark and stormys were quite tasty! No room for dessert this visit, dinner was good and plenty! Highly recommend the Zilker Park location of Salt Coast Traders!

Winter 2024

We had a delicious dinner with family last week at ​S​alt ​Traders. The cocktails were good, and the wine list, though short, has a very nice selection of varietals. For appetizers, we tried the oysters on the half shell and the ceviche. Both were excellent! Oysters were super fresh, and the dozen included three different types of oysters. The ceviche was made with salmon, and a lot of it​ ... very good indeed!

We all tasted all of the entrées ordered, which included shrimp and grits, wood-fired salmon (with a side of bacon mac & cheese), fried fish and shrimp platter, fish and chips, and cioppino. We all agreed every dish was on point, seasoned perfectly, and served hot. Special mention on the cioppino… I make a great cioppino, Salt Traders​'​ was a close second!

We decided to hang around for dessert, and we tried the iced coconut mousse and the Keylime pie. Both were excellent! Shout out to our waiter Tom C, great service, attentive but not intrusive, and he displayed a great sense of humor as one of our party knocked her water ​glass ​over a couple of times! LOL It was a wonderful experience, we’ll be back!

Update 11-17-2023

Another awesome meal...

Another amazing meal at Salt Traders this week! From start to finish, everything was superb... for beginners, Aubry, our waiter, did a fantastic job, attentive but not intrusive. The best waiter we've had in quite a while! Thank you Aubry!

For starters, we headed straight into the sea: oysters and ceviche. Both were outstanding... the oysters were big, plump Gulf oysters, served icy cold with all the trimmings, saltines and hot sauce on the side. To die for! The ceviche was also very good, perfect citrus-cooked fish, mango, and a little heat, served with lime wedges. Delicious!

Entrees included shrimp and grits, fish and chips and cioppino. The grits were perfect, shrimp grilled to a "T" with a nice Cajun sauce included. The fish and chips were likewise off the charts, perfectly seasoned fish, light batter, fried to perfection. Very tasty, seasoned fries as well, also served piping hot!

The star of the evening, however, was the cioppino. I've tried cioppino all over, and I make a pretty darn good one too (recipe from Phil's Fish Market in CA). Salt Trader's cioppino was heaven in a bowl. Not only was the broth divine, the amount of top-quality seafood in the bowl was amazing! If you're a fan of cioppino, you have to try this one. If you're not a fan of cioppino, you should still try it! LOL

Finally, we topped the evening off with a slice of key lime pie... wonderfully delicious and finished in minutes. So good, in fact, we ordered another slice to go!

One of the things we love about Salt Traders is how the waitstaff works like a team. Your waiter/waitress doesn't bring out your food, the restaurant has (what appears to be) staff dedicated to delivering food to the tables, which guarantees the temps on all the dishes are great, hot or cold. Love that! We'll...

This was our first visit and it was not worth the money. We visited Salt Traders on Saturday just before the dinner rush. The hostess was pleasant and our server Tom, was fantastic. We had a large party and even ended up having some surprise visitors that joined us late. Tom was on top of things, filled our drinks regularly and even joked around. We ordered two shrimp cocktail for the table, it was different, but good. It didn’t have a strong horseradish taste, and had a slight kick of heat, but not bad. Almost like a spicy ketchup but not quite. Some in our party got the clam chowder and the gumbo. Both of those items were great. A few had nigiri of the day which was the salmon belly, and they enjoyed that as well. We had two orders of bread, and they were ok. The crust was great but the bread didn’t really have any flavor. It was nice and chewy inside with the nice crust outside. They served it with a few bread n’ butter pickle slices, but there really wasn’t any flavor in the pickles either. My nephew had a kids shrimp and fries. They were both good. 3 of our guests had burgers and they were ok, nothing special. One of our guests didn’t finish and only took two bites, but loved the fries and finished them off. She had also ordered the bacon Mac & cheese. It looked delicious with bread crumbs and cheese on the top with creamy sauce. But that was about it, it didn’t really have any flavor. I ordered shrimp and grits. It had 4 shrimp on top, but a large portion of grits. The shrimp were excellent but unfortunately, the grits were just flavorless, almost watered down. One of my sons had scallops and ordered the purée on the side. He ended up really enjoying the purée on the scallops and was pleased with his meal. My other son had airline chicken. They burned the chicken and it was only a small portion with the bone-in and the risotto was flavorless mush. From what I could tell, the chicken was supposed to be part of a breast and the wing. My husband and mom had the fish and chips. It looked delicious. Nice hunks of fish, and a large pile of fries. Both really enjoyed their fries but said the fish was flavorless and didn’t even have any salt on it. The tartar sauce was delicious. Another guest had the fried platter and it appeared burned as well. My other sister had the seafood pasta and she enjoyed it. My daughter ordered the crab fried rice. It had hard bits of burned rice in it and was oily, not what we thought it would be at all and you couldn’t enjoy it with all of the bits of burned, hard rice. Other than the scallops and the airline chicken, everything had nice portions for the cost, but just not any flavor. Overall, we were very dissatisfied with our food, but we enjoyed our time and Tom’s service. We were told great things about Salt Traders and were sadly disappointed, especially with the amount of...

Went in today with my boyfriend expecting nothing really, we just looked up oysters in the map and this was the first option that popped up and oh boy!. We are simply fascinated. Service: Our server Meghan was very warm, welcoming, helpful and friendly, she definitely added up to the experience, her expertise and professionalism are top notch. Now the food: We just wanted some oysters, we had never been here before, we were not that hungry, we just wanted a little treat, and Meghan told us that we were in perfect timing for happy hour so we’d be getting $1 off in all the oysters, even better!. They had a good variety of oysters, we ordered 2 of each to try them all out, there was only one of them that we didn’t like not because it was bad but it just didn’t taste like anything really, it’s the one called Little Prince if that helps. Now we were so delighted and greatly surprised with the other ones that we ordered 12 more, each!. We ended up eating 36 oysters! And we were about to order more just because they were that good but we were too full already!. My personal preference was the Gulf ones and Summertime and my boyfriend’s were the Conway ones (Still big shout out St Simon I think, 100/10) (I can’t remember the name of the other one lol but if was really good too!). The kettle chips were also a hit, they felt and taste fresh, like genuinely made in house. For dessert we tried the coconut pineapple mousse whatever it’s called, I liked it but I wouldn’t go crazy for it, my boyfriend loooved it so I’d say it’s just a matter of preferences, but great option for those who don’t like extremely sweet desserts. Issues: We didn’t have a single issue with our food at all or the service, everything was genuinely perfect. Check: Our check was $141 and some change for the 36 oysters, one beer, one mocktail, the kettle chips and the dessert. A little extra magic: They ask you for allergies as soon as you sit down, the pear mocktail is DELICIOUS and they have a little wall of spicy sauces you can pick from but their house one is honestly delicious!

Overall: Definitely recommend!, I’d love to come back here every time.

(Photo was taken halfway through our dozens, I apologize, we were too excited to take...