COMMENT OF THE DAY: NOT THE ONLY BURGER JOINT OFF 20TH ST. 
“Really needed another burger option in that area. So within a couple minutes drive of each other there will now be The Burger Joint, Balls Out Burger, Hubcap, Bernie’s Burger Bus, Becks Prime, Christian’s Tailgate, Whataburger, Cedar Creek, and all the other fast food options.” [DL, commenting on Blank Abel Motors Sign Now Directing N. Shepherd Traffic to Its Burger Joint Replacement] Illustration: Lulu
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Restaurants
A Swamplot reader sends photos of a few street-fronting changes over at the new Pizza Motus moving in next to West University Masonic Lodge No. 1292: There’s now a sign on the storefront and some benches on the sidewalk outside it. A bit tougher to spot is the door in the middle of the concave façade; it recently turned green.
Former tenant Edloe St. Cafe had the whole place painted red during its time inside:
On Deck in West U.
The owner of the vacant, 3,476-sq.-ft. King’s Center retail building a few blocks outside Beltway 8 has installed Smoothie King as its first new tenant. But the beverage chain doesn’t quite have the place under sovereign domain: developer Ancorian is still marketing the structure’s 2,400-sq.-ft. vacant majority.
In the photo above, you can see some of the circular residue on the tower left behind by previous tenant Logan Farms Honey Glazed Hams & Market Café. The less-aptly-named restaurant left the building it had occupied in full for greener strip center pastures down the street on the corner of Wilcrest Dr. at the end of 2016.
It had the place done up like this during its residency:
By Royal Decree
The complicated thing about trying to turn an old Heights home — like this one at 733 W. 24th St. — into a coffee shop is that the neighborhood’s original lots are smaller than Houston allows for commercial use. Although the house pictured at top sits on a pair of adjacent 25-ft. lots, their combined frontage still falls short of the 60-ft. minimum required to lump them together into a space for something other than single-family residential.
But that’s not stopping the owner that bought the house earlier this year from seeking an exception to the rule. On Thursday, Houston’s city planning commission will consider a variance that’d allow the plans to go ahead anyway by consolidating the lots into a single 50-ft.-wide, business-friendly parcel.
Then comes the question of parking. Right now, a driveway leads up to a carport on the west side of the house:
Cafe Conversion
Here’s another Midtown development development: Georgian breakfast restaurant Flying Biscuit Café is the first tenant to line up for a spot in the tower Caydon Property’s putting up off Main St., between Drew and Tuam streets. The 27-story building — viewed above from the east side of Fannin St. — is just south of the Art Supply on Main store that Caydon just recently snatched up and plans to replace with one in the threesome of towers that’ll eventually stretch up to McGowen.
Flying Biscuit’s other destination as part of its 2-pronged Houston entrance strategy: the west side of the strip on Kingsride Ln. off Gessner where Reginelli’s Pizzeria decamped earlier this month:
Flightplans
Although the lettering’s been gone from Abel Motors’ roadside sign since the auto shop moved in 2016, it’s still got a helpful pointer for passers-by: The Burger Joint is about to take the place over. Pictured above is what the dealership looked like on the northeast corner of Shepherd and 20th St. in its heyday. Since peeling out for a new spot at 9102 Airline Dr., its old digs have been transformed by the brick strip center pictured at top — soon to house the burger restaurant’s first venture north from its sole existing location on Montrose at Westheimer.
Another view of the new burger sign shows it’s still drawing a blank on lower-level messaging:
Shifting Gears
The parking garage at the Lyric Centre has begun glowing as part of its transformation into Lyric Market, one in the trio of planned Houston food halls. Though the venue on the corner of Smith and Preston streets isn’t open yet, its exterior has been all over the light spectrum lately, radiating both the rainbow and patriotic displays shown above.
Solid color schemes have been in the mix too:
Bright Food Hall Future
VEGAN FOOD TRUCK NOW PARKING AT HEIGHTS WATERWORKS ON NICHOLSON ST. 
Vegan food truck Ripe Cuisine is now well on its way to a brick-and-mortar spot in the soon-to-be redone Heights Waterworks utility turned retail complex on W. 20th St. According to a building permit filed yesterday, the owner is signing up for a 2,061-sq.-ft. renovation of one of the structures Braun Enterprises is leasing out. The map above from the developer — which began buying up portions of the property last year — marks the restaurant’s territory fronting Nicholson St. and its parallel bike trail with the bright red tomato logo that’s native to its food truck. But that’s not really the look to expect from the plant-based restaurant once its fully-grown; it’s rebranding to Verdine. Derived from the Latin for “green” and “truth,” explains the restaurant’s fledgling website, the name comes with a brand-new V-shaped logo, complete with a small bird nested in the crook of angled capital letter. [Previously on Swamplot] Map: Braun Enterprises
BRASA’S STEAKHOUSE WILL DEBUT IN ABANDONED KALEIDOSCOPE THEATER ON CAPITOL 
Recent permit filings show that the abandoned Kaleidoscope Theater on the Capitol-St.-side of the St. Germain Lofts at 705 Main St. is about to be reborn as a steakhouse. Founded by 2008 American Idol contestant Colton Berry 6 years ago, the theater played host to cabaret-style productions during its time in the space. But in the summer of 2016, Berry told the audience at a production of “PEOPLE” that the theater company was shutting down and splitting from the building, reported the Chronicle. That left a roughly 8,000 sq.-ft. hole in the north side of the residential structure — pictured above from the corner of Main and Capitol where the theater is survived by another, once-neighboring ground-floor tenant, Flying Saucer Draught Emporium. [Previously on Swamplot] Photo: Realtor.com
In other abandoned Montrose restaurant news: crews have finished smashing up the Burger King on Westheimer a block west of Montrose Blvd., leaving the property in fast food limbo ahead of its planned takeover by Houston’s fourth Shake Shack location. Pictured above is the restaurant’s drive-thru lane minus the accompanying drive-thru infrastructure.
A Cherry Demolition excavator is still picking through scraps left behind from the teardown; they’re now spread out atop the former building’s foundation, visible below:
Nothing-Burger
The owners of the 22,860-sq.-ft. warehouse at the bend where Wash Ave becomes Hempstead Rd. have plans to refashion the building as Houston’s latest food hall, complete with 25-plus restaurant tenants, a few grocery and trinket vendors, and an adjacent beer garden — all fronting 22,000-sq.-ft.-worth of park space. Aside from homonymous salad bar concept Let Us, no specific tenants have been announced for the space yet — formerly home to the Emmett Perry oriental rug store and Sugar Creek Interiors’ design studio. But the developer hints that most food stalls at Railway Heights will be of the fresh-never-frozen variety, staffed by “the farmer who reared the animal, the fisherman who caught the fish, the baker who baked the bread.”
Later on, plans call for a 600-car automatic parking garage (about 2-and-a-half-times the size of that other robo-valet proposed next to Tacos A Go Go on White Oak) to be added on to the site at 8200 Washington, along with a complex of “container apartments” in the southeast corner of the things. Along with the food hall, they’ll all go in the area marked red in the map above, across the train tracks from InTown Homes’ forthcoming Cottage Grove Lake community.
The map below shows how the site will layout in greater detail:
On the Timbergrove Menu
The new owner of the floody Spaghetti Warehouse building downtown has cooked up a novel idea for how to deal with its proximity to Buffalo Bayou: crack open its lower stories and fill them with a floodable dining area that sits below an upper-story bar. Renderings from Diamond Development show how they’re hoping to pull it all off by removing several doors and windows from the back of the 15,000-sq.-ft. building (which an application to Houston’s historic commission notes will be stored away for potential future use) and adding louvers to the building’s east side.
The slats would go in place of the parking-lot-fronting wall shown missing part of its face during Harvey:
Floodable Food Court
A row of 3 tall windows now opens up the Fairview-St.-side of the former McGowen Cleaners, currently being converted into a health-minded restaurant dubbed Vibrant on the corner of Morse St. As for a patio shown cut into the building’s windowed corner in earlier renderings from architect Lake Flato — it’s yet to be installed. But a bunch of other outdoor features such as shrubs, grasses, and the beds that hold them are now in place outside the structure.
They’ve taken over the frontage previously occupied by chopped-up pavement:
Hyde Park
YOUR ODDS OF WINNING A YEAR’S SUPPLY OF CHICKEN SANDWICHES AT CHICK-FIL-A’S NEXT PEARLAND GRAND OPENING 
One in 1,365, a little slimmer than the chance of landing heads on a coin toss 10 times in a row. The Chick-fil-A in question, Pearland’s fifth, opens at Hwy. 288 and Aldine-Fort Bend Rd. on July 25, and in keeping with custom, the store is giving away 52 free #1 meals (chicken sandwich, medium Waffle Potato Fries, and a medium drink) to a group of 100 lucky loyalists selected from those who spend the night before camped out at the location, reports the Chronicle’s Dana Burke. This time though, the franchise is taking measures to ensure that only hometown competitors 18-and-up get access to the prize by limiting eligibility by zip code. The challengers: 77584, 77581, 77588, 77578, 77048, and 77047 — home to 136,500 legal adult residents of Pearland, Brookside Village, Shadow Creek Ranch, Manvel, and parts of Southeast Houston including Crestmont. To keep things competitive, reports Burke: “All participants must remain in their designated spots the entire time, with the exception of bathroom breaks.” [Houston Chronicle] Photo of 2016 Chick-fil-A First 100 event in Prestonwood, Texas: Chick-fil-A
Update: A Swamplot reader notes that Burgerim originated in Israel — and that in Hebrew, the suffix “-im” adds a plural meaning to the word it ends. Read with that grammar in mind, the restaurant’s name translates roughly to “burgers.”
Although Burgerim’s previous attempts to come online next to Subway in the corner of the strip center at Richmond and Shepherd were met with red tags from city inspectors, those notices have now been taken down — reports an employee at the neighboring Honey Art Cafe — and a building permit filed yesterday grants the new instant-messenger-themed restaurant clearance to proceed with renovations to the space.
Previous high-tech retailers in the endcap include Clear Wireless and Wireless Toyz; analogue merchandiser Gold and Silver Buyers held the place down in between their tenures and Mattress Overstock retired from the space most recently, at the end of last year. When the burger place opens, it’ll be the franchise’s first inner-Loop spot, topping off its existing Cypress and W.-Lake-Houston-at-Beltway-8 locations.
- Previously on Swamplot: Mattress Stores Making a Sleepy Retreat from Shepherd; Your Map to Houston Mattress Chain Stores
Photo: Fox E.
Strip Steak
