What would it look like if Meow Wolf opened a restaurant? We’re about to find out, and the answer is apparently a technicolor, nonbinary honky tonk dive bar straight out of the afterlife called Cowboix Hevvven.

Since 2016, Meow Wolf has been opening highly ambitious, interactive, narrative-rich art installations in cities across the U.S., expanding from Santa Fe to Las Vegas, Denver, and Dallas. But with its forthcoming Houston location, the art collective-turned-entertainment company will be incorporating a full service bar and restaurant into the experience for the first time.

The storyline and theme for Meow Wolf Houston remains tightly under wraps. But at least one of its interdimensional portals will lead to Cowboix Hevvven, a country-fried watering hole “where every day is Friday night.”

“This specific space is suspended in a singular moment in time,” Cole Bee Wilson, the artist and longtime Meow Wolf collaborator who dreamt up the supernatural bar, told me.
”It’s always the exact same Friday night whenever you come in.
Always, always.
And it’s been that way for an eternity.”

An armadillo on the pool table at Cowboix Hevvven, the bar and restaurant installation coming to Meow Wolf Houston. Photo by Kate Russell, courtesy of Meow Wolf.

A fifth generation Texan, Wilson grew up riding horses on his grandparent’s cattle ranch. To this day, he still moonlights as a ranch hand outside Santa Fe in the summers.

“For me, cowboy culture is all about the working class,” Wilson said. “As sharp as the style looks, it’s all also extremely functional.
Pearl snaps so you can work a shirt with one hand.
Chaps so the brush doesn’t fuck you up. Pointy boots so you can slide into your stirrups.
A hat to keep the sun off your face. All of that is work clothes.”

But for Meow Wolf, Wilson wants to steer away from heteronormative preconceptions of the cowboy community—the Cowboix spelling functions as a gender neutral, inclusive term that allows anyone to claim the identity of cowboy. The three Vs in “hevvven,” meanwhile, are supposed to be arrows pointing down to hell, welcoming both cowboy angels and cowboy demons.

“It’s speaking to a balance of the binaries of good and evil, because this suspended moment in time is occupying that entire spectrum, as opposed to being on either side,” Wilson said.

An angel musician figure in Cowboix Hevvven, the bar and restaurant installation coming to Meow Wolf Houston. Photo by Kate Russell, courtesy of Meow Wolf.

He originally conceived of Cowboix Hevvven during lockdown in 2020, and submitted a proposal to bring the idea to life at the Real Unreal, the first of Meow Wolf’s Texas outposts. But the creative director there liked the idea so much he felt it should be a functional bar, and one of the main anchor spaces, at Houston.

“A lot of people didn’t quite get it at first.
But they were like, ‘well, if we’re going to Texas, we probably ought to just trust our weirdest Texan,'” Wilson joked.

Cowboix Hevvven is very much the artist’s own personal vision, inspired by his own relationship with grief—there’s even a sculpture of a creature named Eloc (Cole backwards) that cries real tears.

And then there is the very real loss experienced by the Meow Wolf community, in the tragic death of cofounder Matt King in 2022. Wilson and Caity Kennedy, a Meow Wolf cofounder and King’s former long-term partner, have carefully crafted a portrait of the late artist to sit at the bar.

“We’re all just heartbroken,” Wilson said. “The more the sculpture reached a state of completion, the more it looked like him.
And that’s hard, but it turned out really beautiful.
He’s getting an infinite cosmic mezcal pour from the bartender.”

The space is also an homage to the heartbreak so often expressed in country music. Wilson is also a musician, having played at Meow Wolf’s very first show in 2008 and composed much of the soundtrack for the Denver location.

At Cowboix Hevvven, he’s preloaded the jukebox with 100 songs—about one third licensed country classics, one third by local artists, and the rest original tunes he wrote and recorded with others in the Meow Wolf team.

“I basically put out the call to all these other people in the company who are also talented musicians and vocalists,” Wilson said. “I tried to get as many people involved as possible, so that it feels like a whole bunch of different bands.”

There’s also a small stage occupied by the “house band,” the Moody Rainbows and the Cadillac Rattlers, with space for real musicians to perform alongside the sculptures. Wilson hopes programming will include open mic nights and karaoke, with the possibility of staying open after hours from the rest of the experience. (There will also be a separate venue for larger concerts.)

The Moody Rainbows and the Cadillac Rattlers, the house band at Cowboix Hevvven, the bar and restaurant installation coming to Meow Wolf Houston. Photo by Kate Russell, courtesy of Meow Wolf.

The menu is still in development, but expect typical bar and grill offerings—with the New Mexico twist that you can add hatch green chile to any dish. (The chef, Wilson told me, prefers to stay anonymous.)

The 48-seat restaurant will be populated by a colorful cast of regulars, including an elderly and talkative armadillo, a literal pool shark, a country music starlet, and other strange creatures.

“The whole thing,” Wilson said, “is just this psychedelic, poetic love letter to Texas from the heart of a loving weirdo dreamer.”