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It’s August, which means it’s still really hot outside, but at least there’s plenty of quality local shows for you to attend. See here for recommendations that span the first half of the month.

TC Superstar at the Mohawk – Friday, August 4TC Superstar are set to release “Can Love Be Kept Apart” — their third new single of 2023 — this Friday, August 4. On that same night, you can see them at the Mohawk. The collaborative performance group, which sports a synth-leaning sound and plenty of dancers, will be joined by Cloud Companion and Hey Cowboy. Tickets for the show are $15.

Rival Waves at 3TEN ACL Live – Saturday, August 5Rival Waves will play 3TEN ACL Live this Saturday, August 5. The alt rockers will be performing in support of their new album, A Meaningless Chaos, which is due out the day before the show.The Dead Coats and Lola Tried will kick off the evening. Tickets are $15.

Night Drive at the Parish – Saturday, August 5Synth pop vets Night Drive have a new EP, Position II, coming out this Friday, and the release show for it will happen at the Parish the next night, Saturday, August 5. Show up early to catch sets from Haunt Me and Holy Wire. Tickets are $20.

Moving Panoramas & Mountain Time at Hotel Vegas – Thursday, August 10If you prefer an early evening show, then get yourself to Hotel Vegas on Thursday, August 10. Music will get underway at 7:30pm, and the lineup consists of two great longtime Austin acts: Moving Panoramas and Mountain Time (Chris Simpson of Mineral). Tickets for this are just $10.

Britt Daniel & Jo Alice at Antone’s – Friday, August 11Spoon’s Britt Daniel and a friend, Jo Alice, will play Antone’s on Friday, August 11. These two are worth seeing as a duo, but the show will also feature two special guests – Andrew Cashen (of A Giant Dog, Sweet Spirit, and more) and John Doe. Tickets are $20. Get them while you can.

Tameca Jones at Antone’s – Saturday, August 12All-star soul singer Tameca Jones can be seen at Antone’s on Saturday, August 12. The bill for the “Back To School” show also contains Riders Against The Storm and Montenko, which makes it a pretty stacked affair. Tickets are $20.

A French farmers market stand is moving into Ghostline Kitchens to offer brunch to-go starting this month. Paris 13 will open at 3400 Comsouth Drive in the McKinney neighborhood on Tuesday, August 15, with delivery and pickup services available.

Paris 13 serves French dishes like quiche Lorraine and quiche with mushrooms along with samosas including Creole samosas, including one with beef and one with potatoes. The new location will also offer madeleines and crepes.

Paris 13 comes from French-Hmong immigrants and mother-and-daughter duo Phay Ly and Maly Ly. Phay, a Vietnam War refugee, was raised in France where she became a chef and restaurant manager. Daughter Maly came to the U.S. to attend St. Edward’s University and came up with the idea for Paris 13, which started as a catering company. Her parents joined her in Austin after they had to close their food truck in Arkansas due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Maly tells Eater in an email the name Paris 13 refers to the 13th arrondissement of Paris, which has a large Asian community. “It is a reminder that French people come in all colors, shapes, and sizes,” she writes. “We wanted to bring something new and delightful, challenging preconceived notions of what America expects from French culture and cuisine.”

The farmers market stand will continue to operate at Barton Creek Farmers Market from September 2023 through July 2024.

Paris 13 will be open from Tuesday to Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Delivery orders can be placed through DoorDash, Uber Eats, Foodee, and Grubhub, and pickup orders can be made through Paris 13’s website.

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Paris 13

3400 Comsouth Drive, Austin, Texas 78744 Visit Website

As if we weren't already sweating enough, things are heating up for Hatch Chile season. These green (and less commonly, red) peppers are all over Austin menus. A Hatch Chile usually signifies a special commitment to Southwestern cuisine beyond that of the pedestrian — if widely loved — jalapeño.

But ask an Austinite what a Hatch Chile really IS, and you'll be met with blank stares. Let them pick it out of a basket at H-E-B and...wait, are there even any in stock? Thankfully, Central Market is on the job with its 28th annual Hatch Chile Festival from August 2-22.

The grocery store will send teams outside for daily Hatch Chile roasts, adding the special ingredient to "everything from pork chops to pound cakes." Locations across the state plan to go through 125 tons of peppers during this festival, including a free tasting event on August 12.

There are plenty of other places to taste Hatch Chiles year-round in Austin, if you want someone else to prepare them: Torchy's famous Green Chile Queso; JewBoy Burgers' latkes with Hatch Chiles, grilled onions, and melted cheese; and Paco's Tacos makes them the star on a tortilla with beans and cheese.

Like Champagne, Hatch Chiles are named for their provenance: the former floodplains of New Mexico's Hatch Valley. An online seller called the Hatch Chile Store places the growing region across 40,000 acres in New Mexico, California, Arizona, and Texas, but some fanatics say it's not a real Hatch Chile if it's not from the valley, which is fully contained in New Mexico.

A real purist would only accept chiles within the lineage of Joseph Franzoy, an Austrian immigrant and commercial farmer in Hatch who grew his family to more than 700 members over four generations of chile growing. Many informational sources about Hatch chiles are sure to mention the Franzoy name.

If 125 tons seemed like a lot, consider the 300,000 people that visit the small village of Hatch along the Rio Grande each year, according to the New Mexico Tourism Department. These visitors dramatically outnumber the villagers; a group of 1556 as of 2021. A local festival even chooses a chile queen each year.

Central Market attributes the smoky flavor of the chiles to a temperature differential in the valley: big shifts been hot days and cool nights. This is in keeping with widely held gardening wisdom that hotter areas generally create hotter chiles — these generally only pack a mild-to-medium punch at 4,500 units on the Scoville scale. That's about the same or milder than a jalapeño.

If pepper fanatics in Austin choose to visit this pepper hotspot, they'll have to plan quite the drive. Hatch is north of Las Cruces and south of the famously named Truth or Consequences. (Yes, that's a real town.) It's about an 11-hour drive one-way, or Texans can fly into the El Paso International Airport and rent a car for the day.

Those who do make the drive may want to check out a copy of New Mexico Chiles: History, Legend and Lore by documentarian Kelly Culler, whose extended family grows chiles in the Hatch Valley. Some things have changed since its 2015 publication, but it doesn't look like people are losing interest in these crops anytime soon.

AUSTIN (KXAN) — The City of Austin is sharing data with Google on the solar reflectivity of roofs across the community to better understand which parts of town would benefit most from cool roofs, a type of roofing that reduces heat in homes and neighborhoods.

Laura Patiño, the chief resilience officer at the city of Austin, described solar reflectivity as the measure of how much sunlight a roof can reflect. A higher reflectivity means your home is absorbing less heat.

Once the city is done studying the roofs across multiple neighborhoods, it will then be able to use that data to find which areas of town would benefit the most from cool roofs, and could shape some future policy. The data will be a part of Austin’s heat resilience playbook, a tool to reduce urban heat in the city.

“From creating awareness and communicating and educating to residents what they can do to their homes, all the way to creating policies and new standards for how we build in our city that will make our city more adaptive to the changing environment,” Patiño explained.

Cool roofs are exactly what they sound like: Roofs that keep your home cooler.

Solar reflectivity depends on three different aspects: color, material, and the shape of your roof. Patiño said a lighter-color roof will be better at reflecting sunlight. Think about what you wear on a hot day. If your clothes are darker, you will be absorbing more heat than if you wore light colors.

Material also plays a bigger role. There are certain materials that are found to reflect better. The Department of Energy lists a couple of materials that reflect light more. Some of the options include wood shingles, light-colored asphalt shingles, and clay tiles.

Shape will play a role too, Patiño said. A flat roof will not reflect light as well as sloped roofs.

Because cool roofs are designed to reflect more light and reduce the heat absorbed by your home, it is going to save you some money on electricity costs. A Department of Energy study found cool roofs “reduce the annual air-conditioning energy use of a single-story building by up to 15%.”

“You’re talking about less energy consumption, because when your home is reflecting that heat it isn’t getting as hot inside, so you’re looking at lower electricity bills. You’re also looking at better quality of life,” Patiño explained.

Cool roofs will not only keep your home cool, but will reduce the amount of urban heat in your community. Patiño said that can make your walk from your front door to a bus stop much more comfortable.

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AUSTIN (KXAN) — For 75 years, Peter Pan Mini-Golf has been a mainstay in the fabric of Austin’s local business scene. Located off the intersection of Barton Springs Road and S. Lamar Boulevard, brothers Glenn, Jack and Clifford Dismukes launched the business in 1948.

Originally, the mini-golf site was named Varsity Links, according to reporting from the Austin Business Journal. Come the 1950s, the owners embraced the Peter Pan theme that stays with the business today.

Glenn Dismukes hand-sculpted the figurines and characters that adorn the course. His daughter and current co-owner, Margaret Dismukes Massad, told ABJ last year her father began creating the sculptures in the 1950s and carried the practice into the 1960s.

Dismukes Massad and her husband, Julio Massad, took over the business in 2019 as a retirement job of sorts.

“I think the secret to our success that my brother continued on until he passed away, and we’re keeping, is that we just don’t change anything,” Dismukes Massad told ABJ. “And I think that is our best-selling point, is that people love the continuity.”

In the decades since it’s opening, Margaret and Julio said a couple extra coats of paints have been added here, with some additional figures created by sculptor Cheryl Latimer added there — but overall, each said they wanted the business to encapsulate Old Austin sentiments.

“We’re known for being really laid-back,” she told ABJ. “We are like ‘Keep Austin Weird’ — it has been our mantra.”

Its historic roots extend beyond its tenure operating in Austin. In an email to KXAN Thursday, the couple said the land the business sits on is designated as a “State Archaeological Landmark” by the Texas Antiquities Committee and the Texas Historical Commission.

TAC documents read the site “contains the remains of prehistoric camps dating between 3,000 BC and 1,500 AD,” Dismukes Massad added.

Now, the storied business’ future remains in flux. In a rapidly developing Austin burgeoning with million-dollar properties, tech businesses and a soaring population, ABJ reporting revealed both Peter Pan Mini-Golf and the adjacent, now-demolished McDonald’s restaurant next door have been caught up in real estate dealings involving a state agency.

“The fate of these sites will be in the hands of an as-yet-unknown individual: a trustee who will be appointed to oversee family trusts that control the land in question and were set up to aid the Texas Juvenile Justice Department and the state’s orphans,” ABJ reported.

Previously, Dismukes Massad and Massad told ABJ they planned to continue the business for several years, even as its current lease was slated to end in April 2024. Now, it’s future remains in limbo.