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The Nook next door is doing a lot of business take out, they have lines at night.  The wife thinks they might be doing better than reopening with tables separated.  The open container law has been waived.  Young folks are getting beverages and kind of hanging out, though the Nook servers ask them to "distance".

They can walk across the street and hang out by the park, there are some benches over there on the street.

The French restaurant we like may be closed permanently, the interior looks to be depleted of tables.  Hopefully they are just painting and cleaning.  Not much else has reopened for dining, and the places that have are not getting customers.

I suspect many of us were used to "not feeling like cooking, let's go out" and that habit has attenuated now.  Maybe folks get take out and then provide their own beverages.

I was just told by someone that in Odessa, the restaurants are packed to full capacity and nobody wears masks.

My response was based on things you've said and a coworker in Austin have said that people are wearing masks and restaurants are limiting capacity, but that of course most Texans don't consider Austin to be part of Texas, so you can only take your city's experience so far.

That's true everywhere, of course...

The way I look at it is which perception dominates the state.

Here in California, we have plenty of rural population that has NO allegiance to the LA/OC/SD megalopolis or the Bay Area metropolis and the attitudes of those areas. But the population of those areas so dwarf the rest of the state that when people think of "California" they think of the populated coastal areas and not the rural inland areas.

In Illinois, even though the Chicago metropolitan area is a tiny portion of the land mass of the state, it's so much of the population that I believe when most people think of "Illinois" they think of Chicago, or at the very least they think of two completely separate Illinois--Chicagoland and then the rest of the state.

With Texas, I think it's Austin that's the outlier, and often by choice. When you think of "Texas" your perception is big trucks and oil industry and cattle. Even Dallas/Houston, while they're big cities, are seen as more "cowboy/oilmen" cities, that have a VERY different vibe than someplace like San Francisco or Chicago or NYC. Austin's the deliberate outlier, full of tech industry computer nerds, full of college hippies at UT, and where they want to keep it "weird."

Austin isn't big enough to define the state, so it thereby becomes the outlier in the state.

a lot of it has to do with the party of the Governor