Walburg Restaurant (and Arcade) in Walburg, Texas

I recently celebrated my birthday by hanging out in the hill country for a few days and going tubing on the Comal River. As a prelude to those activities we started things off with a side trip to a tiny town just north of Austin called Walburg to check out a place I recently discovered online that had just been screaming out to me for a visit - the Walburg Restaurant.

The Walburg Restaurant reportedly offered several things that are right up my alley - good German food, a wide variety of German beers, and an arcade on the property (what!?). And we were more or less in the area so I HAD to go check it out.

First, the beer - they list about 20 German beers on the beer menu on their website, but I'm pretty sure they had quite a few more choices than that - just don't ask me to name them because I had never heard of most of them and the only German I speak is Prost! (learned that one from Beerfest) and Jawohl, herr kommandant! and mach schnell! (got those off Hogan's Heroes. So many exclamation marks - do Germans really yell that much?). So anyway, good beer = check.

Next, the food. They have a menu, but we went on Friday night and they had the buffet rockin' so we went that route. It was a mixture of German and America food with stuff like schnitzel, bratwurst, and sauerbraten alongside fried catfish, shrimp, and brisket. Mrs. MP thought it was awesome, and although I was a little more tempered in my rating I still thought everything was very good except for the potato soup which I wasn't too crazy about. So German food = check.

And lastly, the tie-in to this blog (maybe this part shoulda been first), the Arcade. When is the last time you saw any arcade games in the wild? It's pretty rare man!


The arcade was in an old shack out by the biergarten and there were a couple dozen arcade games along with a foozball table and an air hockey table. I heard there were pins too but I didn't see any - hopefully I didn't miss an entire section somewhere!


Here is a quick rundown of the games I saw:

S.T.U.N. Runner (never seen this one before)
Marble Madness (in a Beat the Champ cabinet? but worked great!)
California Speed
Hydro Thunder
Crazy Taxi
Deer Hunting USA
World Class Bowling Deluxe
Sonic Championship (new one to me)
39-in-1 Multicade (2 of these)
Area 51 / Maximum Force (P2 gun didn’t work)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time (P1 joystick was shaky)
Williams Multicade (with Robotron, Defender, Stargate, Joust, Sinistar, Bubbles, Splat)
Trophy Hunting Bear and Moose
Crisis Zone
X-Men vs. Street Fighter
Dynamite Cop (I hate this game)
Daytona USA (2 of them connected to each other)
Terminator 2 Judgment Day (P2 Gun didn’t work, but P1 gun worked fine)
Nicktoons Racing (Monitor said "no-signal")
Off Road Challenge
Dolphin Blue (never heard of this odd 2003 shooter but I liked it!)
Rampage World Tour
Ms. Pac-Man (Turbo)
L.A. Machine Guns
Pole Position (Classic cockpit version - but not working! argggh!!)


I was hoping for a few more games and a few of them had some mechanical issues that needed a little attention, but overall I enjoyed it. Hey, the arcade gets major points just for existing at all! And the selection of games was okay - although I would have liked to see a few more of the older ones from the 80's, and a few more from a genre other than drivers and shooters. You could play a number of older titles - it's just that you would be playing them on a multicade instead of the real thing which is a little anticlimactic but still pretty cool. Mrs. MP played the hell outta Frogger on the Multicade.

The Arcade is only open on Fridays and Saturdays from 6:00 PM-Midnight, so if you want to play be sure to be out there in that timeframe. Otherwise you can still go in and look at them but they will all be powered down. Also, the Arcade crowd is mostly kids until it starts pushing 10:00 PM or so, but they are very small so they shove out of the way real easy (just kidding people!). They also have a biergarten and live music performed by the local group the Walburg Boys - but I was too busy in the arcade to go check them out so I can't say anything about them one way or the other.

So would I go back? Well, I don't know if I would make another special trip out of the way like that, but if I was already going to be in the Austin area then yeah, I would definitely go back. So check it out if you're in the area. The official address (if you are going by GPS) is in Georgetown, but if you're looking at a map they are in Walburg.

The Walburg Restaurant
3777 FM 972
Georgetown, Texas
512-863-8440