Official opening date for the new 24 Hour Fitness Super-Sport club carved out of the old Bally’s space at 2500 Dunstan St., just east of Kirby: This Saturday. Yes, this is only the company’s 33rd Houston-area location. Indoor lap pool, basketball and racquetball courts, towel service, blah blah blah.
Photos: Candace Garcia
A few days ahead of its scheduled public debut later this week, Swamplot photographer Candace Garcia got the new Brockman Hall for Physics to sit still for a brief photo session at its new Rice University home. (That wasn’t too difficult: The structure features underground labs specially outfitted to dampen vibrations.) For the occasion, the university’s newest model chose several different outfits: a gridded terracotta rainscreen over a slip of colored aluminum composite cladding on its southern face, a patterned glass curtain wall silk-screened with a Penrose pattern on the north, and underneath, some plain concrete leggings:
Note: The discounting has begun. See update below.
A weekend and a day after she sent out word that Historic Houston’s 7-year-old recycled-house-parts warehouse at 1307 West Clay St. would be shutting down, the nonprofit organization’s founder and executive director says she’s currently evaluating a few options that might allow her to keep the salvage operation in business. “Some very incredible offers came forward on Friday,” Lynn Edmundson tells Swamplot, “and I am spending the next day or two investigating each one to see if any of them will work out . . . as an interim strategy to keep the warehouse opened and operating for a few more months.”
Edmundson also says numerous supporters of the organization asked her to “calculate what cash we would need to stay afloat for 3 months — and then ask for it.” Which she did in a follow-up email she sent out Friday, seeking 500 donations of $100 each. Edmundson says she was encouraged by the immediate response: The first $1,000 was raised within 5 minutes of sending out the request. “We may not raise all that we need,” she says, but whatever amount is raised might “buy us a little more time to explore the options that have been offered.”
59 BORDERS: THE END 
Late addition to the Borders Books store closing list: The company’s 27,483-sq.-ft. store at that retention-pond-by-the-freeway shopping center in Stafford, Fountains on the Lake. The Stafford location is expected to be the only Houston-area casualty of the company’s bankruptcy, and is scheduled to close by “late May.” It and 2 dozen other stores around the country were added to the 200-store axe list at the end of last week. [Revised closing list (PDF); previously on Swamplot] Photo: Melissa M.
Sporting a new stick-on West Elm look outside but a more modern feel inside, the rebuilt Mai’s Restaurant will open next month, a year and 2 months after a fire gutted the Midtown Vietnamese pioneer. A Swamplot reader who lives nearby and says he’s been “waiting patiently” to eat there again sends in this photo from this morning of the building front at 3403 Milam, along with a few notes and questions. But first, a few sneak peeks at the restaurant’s not-quite-finished interior from earlier this week:
Counting from the date on the notice taped to the front door, it’s only been a little more than 2 weeks since Terlingua Border Cafe got locked out of its space at the southern end of that super-festive Shops at Memorial Heights strip center at 920 Studewood. But already people have begun to notice the restaurant’s absence. A couple of Swamplot readers sent in these pics of the Border Cafe ghost town. A snapshot of that friendly little letter from the landlord, after the jump:
Local nonprofit Historic Houston is no longer accepting donations of building materials, and is closing its salvage warehouse and ending its salvage program, reports the organization’s founder and executive director, Lynn Edmundson. The organization stored and sold donated historic building materials reclaimed from doomed houses at a leased warehouse and yard at 1307 W. Clay and a separate “overflow” facility across the street at 1214 Joe Annie. Historic Houston’s 9-year-old salvage program typically removed and saved doors, windows, flooring, shiplap, siding, stair rails treads, and plumbing and lighting fixtures from old houses slated for demolition.
Never mind the construction work still going on in the parking lot next door: B4-u-eat guesses El Real Tex Mex No. 7 will open quietly at 1201 Westheimer this Saturday — well, at least for a broadcast of the Southbound Food radio show. Actual opening date for the vintage Tex-Mex venture put together by Bryan Caswell, Robb Walsh, and Bill Floyd in the old Tower Theatre? Uh, “soon.” Chefs were busy pouring on the lard, and waiters were getting some training there earlier this week. If you’re looking for El Reals Nos. 1 through 6, you’ll need to wait a bit longer.
Photo: Candace Garcia
The bottom 2 floors of the 6-level parking garage at One Park Place will be dedicated for shoppers at the new Phoenicia Specialty Foods market going into that building, reports the Chronicle‘s Purva Patel. How convenient will that be for folks arriving by car who want to grab a few pitas from the conveyer belt and then head around the other side of the building to Discovery Green for a picnic? The opening of the 28,000-sq.-ft. store at 1001 Austin St. was originally scheduled for December and then April. It’s now been delayed until “at least” May 15.
Brock Silverstein tells the HBJ‘s Allison Wollam the strip-center endcap on the northwest corner of Briar Forest and Eldridge Parkway where he and his wife Stacey just opened the Pecan Creek Grille is one of the locations he had investigated a year and a half ago as a possible new home for the then-ready-to-roam Buffalo Grille. Fans of that West U breakfast joint, where the Silversteins worked for 10 years, may find this new lunch spot in the Energy Corridor a little familiar, in a way-out-west kind of way: Pecan Creek has an outdoor patio and serves “diner-style” food, Tex-Mex standards, and breakfast all day.
How long will the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema be sticking around at the West Oaks Mall, now that Regal Entertainment Group has announced it’s going to open a new 14-screen Edwards Theatre multiplex there in the fall of 2012? A spokesperson for Triple Tap Ventures wouldn’t say directly, explaining that the beer-and-movie house will remain open “throughout the planned construction and into the foreseeable future.” But the Alamo Drafthouse owner doesn’t appear to be looking as far ahead as the mall’s owners, who’ve already announced that the 6-screen theater will close after the new theater is opened.
The Edwards multiplex will go into the mall’s west wing, where Mervyns used to be. Next door will be a new plaza with 3 restaurants and outdoor seating. Triple Tap reports it is still looking to open new Alamo Draft House locations both inside the Loop and around the Houston area.
Photo: Joel Barhamand
The owner of the Pepperoni’s Pizza chain — which has locations in First Colony, New Territory, Pecan Grove, Riverstone, Rosenberg, Greatwood, Woodbridge, Sienna Plantation, and Fulshear — plans to open a bistro focused on local ingredients in the former Ziggy’s Healthy Grill space at the corner of West Alabama and Greenbriar. (Before Ziggy’s, the down-in-front space in the 2-story office building at 2202 West Alabama housed natural-foods store A Moveable Feast.) A sign advertising Sorrel Urban Bistro now hangs out front. Ray Salti tells the HBJ‘s Allison Wollam he expects his new farm-to-table restaurant — which will feature a new menu each week — will open up by early May, and that he’ll count both Mark’s and Haven as his closest competition. Salti also owns Ray’s Grill in Fulshear.
Photos: Aaron Carpenter
The next landing site for Chindian food in Sugar Land? A 4,000-sq.-ft. space wedged between Busybody Home Fitness and the Stomping Grounds kiddie playland, in the First Colony Commons shopping center at 59 and Williams Trace, just a few doors down from the Home Depot. The new Hakka Chinese joint there should have its soft opening around the end of next week — presuming all goes well with the inspections scheduled for Monday. A grand opening is scheduled for the middle of March. “In India, Hakka cuisine is like Tex-Mex in Texas — kind of. It’s a very popular cuisine,” Irfan Motiwala tells Swamplot. But it’ll be all new for Sugar Land. Fortunately, Motiwala explains, the Hakka people are used to adjusting flavors to meet local tastes. That’s how the whole Chindian food thing came about, after all: in the 1950s, once large numbers of the already nomadic people fleeing Mao’s revolution settled in India, they started incorporating local spices like coriander and tandoori masala into their cooking, giving it a little more zing. Motiwala’s wife, Hsiaolin, and her brother-in-law, Gary Yan, both of whom will be running things in the kitchen, expect a little bit of the same process to take place at the 15425 Southwest Freeway location of Aling’s Hakka Chinese Cuisine. “If I find the people of Sugar Land eat more spicy than normal, i will adjust it,” Yan says.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHAT YOU MISSED AT THE GREAT FORBIDDEN GARDENS ONE-THIRD-SCALE QIN DYNASTY SELL-OFF 
“I was there on Sunday, came home w/ 2 soldiers, 1 horse and 3 small figurines. The soldiers are FANTASTIC and I wish I had bought more, but for 100 ea it was a little steep to get a whole army of them. I have a bit of buyer’s remorse about the horse, b/c its in pretty bad shape, and is not long for the world. But it was only 25$. There were many people there, but it was by no means crowded, took 45 minutes to get in the gates.
The woman who rang me up, told me that a salvager was going to come by on Monday (yesterday) so I imagine the remaining men who were [intact] (there were still 100s left at noon on Sunday) will start turning up in thrift shops around.
What else? I am glad I got to see the gardens one time before it was destroyed. It was a lovely ground and I wish I had known about it. (I sort of knew about it, but never went.)
Apparently they were going to sell all the cherry trees as well, so they may still be on the market.” [anon, commenting on The 6,000 Garden Gnomes of Emperor Qin: Let the Great Houston Grave Ransacking Begin] Photo: Candace Garcia
COMMENT OF THE DAY: LOST TOMB OF THE GRAND PARKWAY “The bulldozed-over ones will make for some serious headscratching in the 23rd century when they are dug up and ‘discovered.’ Maybe the Asiatic Proconsul will use it as propaganda/proof [that] Global Manifest Destiny was already in the making in the early 21st century.” [SL, commenting on The 6,000 Garden Gnomes of Emperor Qin: Let the Great Houston Grave Ransacking Begin]
