When I first got hired at The Woodland, I said ‘I want to work, I need a job, but I’m in a band and I need to get days off when I have a show,’ Curtis O’Mara recalls over a beer and a shot, the standard post-shift drink combination. After touring all over the U.S., Europe and beyond with Harlem last year, playing with bands like The Dead Weather, Hole, Wavves and Best Coast, O’Mara is back in Austin, cooking at The Woodland and playing music with his new side project Grape St., which he started with Chris Castillo of The Stuffies. “It’s really nice. I’ve been on tour so many different times, for months on end, and I still come back and I still work at The Woodland,” O’Mara says. “I’m very much appreciative of that.”

In Austin, a town with more musicians than paying gigs, the service industry provides the flexible and social jobs that many creatives need to supplement their income. And it’s possible to find restaurants with understanding and supportive owners and multiple musicians on the staff, making shift trading easier.

Music and restaurants have always been passions for Michael Terrazas, owner of The Woodland and Club de Ville and a partner in Transmission Entertainment, so he allows more freedom with the schedule, “as long as someone shows up to cover their shift.” He says: “All of our places really support and encourage creativity. [These musicians] have chosen to pursue this life and we all know it’s not easy.” As a longtime restaurateur who has contributed to the development of the music scene on Red River and Austin as a whole, Terrazas sees a connection: “I don’t know which came first, the restaurant and bar scene or the club and music venue scene, because they feed off of each other so much — the folks who work in these restaurants and bars to support themselves are the ones who perform and socialize in the same clubs and venues and vice versa.”

Originally from Tucson, O’Mara has taken advantage of one of the most appealing aspects of working in the restaurant industry — the mobility. He has cooked in kitchens and played in bands all over the country. In Arizona, he started out as a dishwasher in a Greek restaurant and worked his way up to become the night cook at The Grill, a 24- hour downtown diner, where his punk band would sometimes play. “It would fill up and turn into a nightclub, and people would be pounding on the floor, screaming,” he says. After a stint “working the wok,” at a Pho restaurant, O’Mara moved on to Nashville to play country western music, and worked in a southern bistro, where he once cooked a New York Strip, medium rare, with mashed potatoes for Dolly Parton and then gave her a hug. “I love Dolly Parton, and I’ve listened to her records for a long time, and whenever I hear her voice my heart sinks down into my stomach,” O’Mara says. Then, he formed Harlem and headed out West. “In Nashville, I was the lead line cook guy, but then I moved to L.A. and worked at this really fancy French restaurant [Café Stella], and I was the cheese plate guy,” he says. From there he headed north to Portland and a Spanish tapas restaurant, and then it was south to Austin and The Woodland, which is where he has worked for the past three years and is where he met Aaron Sinclair of Frank Smith and Gray Hickox, who both play in Grape St. with him. While music is O’Mara’s first priority, he takes his job cooking seriously and he misses it when he’s been out on tour for a long time. “The highlight of the whole damn deal is just knowing that you’re getting better. Knowing that you’re palate is maturing and you can identify a lot of ingredients. And you can really know how to make other people happy,” he says.

Down South Congress from The Woodland, Logan Middleton splits his shifts between waiting tables and tending bar at Botticelli’s (where Terrazas also happens to be an investor) to pay the bills and the expenses for his band, The Laughing (wearethelaughing.com). Middleton, who studied film composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston, has noticed Austin has more of a DIY music community. “My decision coming here was going the slightly more artistic route,” he explains. “There weren’t obvious job placements like in New York.” While ideally, he would support himself off of his music, he says, “One liberating aspect about not depending on my music to support myself financially is that I…don’t have to tailor my sound or songwriting toward anything other than what I want to create.” Middleton has been at Botticelli’s for four years now, where he works with an array of other musicians, including Jesse Ebaugh of Heartless Bastards. “To be honest, most of the people I’ve met in this town have been through some offshoot of working in the restaurant industry,” he says. For now he likes the flexibility of serving and bartending, and has no designs on a management position — “I like that I don’t have to take my work home,” he says — but he did just sign on to create his first video game score for The Cell due out in June from New Life Interactive.

On the East Side, Shelly McKann, who plays keys and sings for the much loved ‘60s girl group The Carrots among other projects, waits tables at Justine’s. A native Austinite, McKann, who says, “I always wanted to be self sufficient,” has been working in restaurants since she was 15. Her resume includes stints at the Red River Café, the Eastside Café, Hyde Park Bar and Grill, Mars, Olivia and Red House Pizzeria. Although she grew up singing in the church choir and taking piano lessons, she didn’t play in a band until she was 19 — it was called Monster Eats Pilot and she was one of the “back-up screamers.” Sadly after six years, The Carrots will be disbanding this summer following their first and final full-length release, but McKann is excited to focus on performing her own music. And while, she is happy waiting tables at Justine’s for now, she says, “I definitely don’t want to be doing this forever.” Eventually she plans to go back to school, but music “will always be a part of my life…it keeps me sane when nothing else does.”