Note: Story updated below. Midtown Auto Care, at 2519 Wroxton St., is still open for business.
The Eighteenth Cocktail Bar is the latest bar to die at at 2511 Bissonnet St., just east of Kirby Dr. Previous short-lived tenants at that location included the Antique Bar and a reprise version of the Gallant Knight. But this will likely be the last of the dying breed — at least in the property’s current incarnation. An LLC run by the owners of local Tex-Mex restaurant chain Escalante’s purchased the property late last year — along several neighboring parcels. Add those lots to the office building at 5311 Kirby, which the same entity has owned for a couple years, and you have about an acre and a half of land surrounding the Chevron station at the corner of Kirby and Bissonnet, with frontage on Kirby, Bissonnet, and Wroxton.
The project manager from homebuilder Frasier Homes busy turning the interior of the shuttered patio-fronting Taco Milagro space at 2555 Kirby Dr. into a second location for Benjy Levit’s upscale sandwich shop Local Foods tells Eater Houston’s Darla Guillen that construction will likely be complete in a couple of weeks. How long after that before it opens for duck confit and falafel on wheat? “Shouldn’t be too far behind that completion date,” Guillen says an employee tells her. But we’re guessing they’ll take down the old Taco signage outside before then. 
Cottage Grove lesbian bar The Usual shut down its patio-by-the-railroad-tracks location last week, and marked the occasion with a 
Garden Oaks, Oak Forest, and Independence Heights–area customers who received a not-entirely-clear email this morning from Lands’ End calling attention to the “big savings on everything” in the Sears store at 4000 N. Shepherd Dr. in Houston, but noting that “Unfortunately, we’ll be closing that location on 1/31/14″: Here’s a little explication for you. Only the Lands’ End store within the Garden Oaks Sears will be closing at the end of the month. The Sears itself will remain open, for the time being. Photo: 
After announcing just last week that it had given up all hope that the 
The River Oaks name spreads its tendrils again: Just a day or so after shuttering its location on the corner of Westheimer and Buffalo Speedway, topiary-in-a-pot hotspot River Oaks Plant House has sprouted in a new location, 6103 Kirby Dr., where it’s already open for business. Evicted from its longtime home on land bought last year by the St. John’s School, the greenery retailer has responded by buying the Village Flowery, an employee tells Swamplot. The Village Flowery is perched on the western reaches of the Rice Village on the southeast corner of Kirby and Rice Blvd. [
