Coming next April to this Studewood corner just across 8th St. from Antidote Coffee, according to My Table: a second, more food-focused location of the Sonoma Retail Wine Bar and Restaurant on Richmond that backs up to the art galleries on Colquitt. Venture Commercial’s leasing package for the property shows the existing 2,160-sq.-ft. building at 803 Studewood spiffed up, with this adjacent apartment building knocked down to make room for 24 parking spaces:
Got a question about something going on in your neighborhood you’d like Swamplot to answer? Sorry, we can’t help you. But if you ask real nice and include a photo or 2 with your request, maybe the Swamplot Street Sleuths can! Who are they? Other readers, just like you, ready to demonstrate their mad skillz in hunting down stuff like this:
Are we batting only .500 here?
Several readers have written in to report on the apparent demise of the Octane Coffee and Wine Lounge at the corner of 34th St. and North Shepherd. “As of Sunday,” says one correspondent, “the place was shut with a computer-generated ‘Sorry We’re Closed’ sign taped to the door, and a Pink’s employee next door said the owners had been carrying stuff out all day.” The morning and night spot opened almost exactly a year ago, one of the first tenants in the renovated but still-modern Garden Oaks strip center.
Photo: Candace Garcia
Storied Heights hangout 11th Street Cafe, at the corner of 11th St. and Studewood, is now closed, a tipster reports. It’s scheduled to reopen Saturday with a new menu and a slightly different name: Ruggles’ 11th Street Cafe. The Heights location will be the third in Bruce Molzan’s growing Ruggles Green empire — the counter-service restaurant’s second location opened in CityCentre last year.
Photo: Candace Garcia
Noting the new handcrafted plywood “for sale or lease” signs now hanging on White Oak in front of King Biscuit Patio Cafe, a few Swamplot readers have written in to tell us that it looks like the Woodland Heights restaurant’s promised comeback has been called off before it even started. Restaurant guide b4-u-eat announced last month that building owner Pat Quinn would be teaming up with former Fitzgerald’s owner Sara Fitzgerald to reopen the restaurant. One reader tells Swamplot that remodeling work came to a halt 2 weeks ago, and that Fitzgerald spent all of last Thursday moving out of the building. The signs — one of them advertising the availability of owner financing — were posted over the weekend.
Photos: Swamplot inbox
This drive-by pic of the former Fu’s Garden Restaurant space at the corner of Kirby and University shows what looks to be the exfoliation of some of the building’s 1950s-era accoutrements. The longtime Rice Village restaurant closed quietly several months ago: “They seem to be removing the vertical louvers from the second story and boarding over the windows,” notes the reader who sent in the photo.
Photo: Swamplot inbox
Thank you, readers, for all the pix you’ve been sending of the ongoing strip show on Lower Westheimer just east of Montrose. Why are the outside walls now gone from the former Felix Mexican Restaurant? Termites ate ’em — or at least polished off enough lard-laden cellulose to require the entire exterior wood structure to be rebuilt. And really, how could the new walls going up for Austin sushi import Uchi — which will reportedly have “many of the same exterior features” as its Tex-Mex predecessor — taste any better?
This somewhat industrial stretch of Berry Rd. just west of Irvington on Houston’s Northside will soon be home to a new food-and-entertainment strip center developed by the Alamo Tamale Company. The 21,000-sq.-ft. theme center and parking lot were designed by Cisneros Design Studio Architects (local ethnographers among our readers may recognize Cisneros as the designer of Katy’s recently shuttered Forbidden Gardens). Lining up on the south-facing strip at 809 Berry will be the best in tamale-themed entertainment: a full-service restaurant, a cantina open late, a panaderia that’ll open early, a banquet and reception hall, and a raspa and dessert bar open primarily on weekends. But the featured destination will likely be the new Alamo Tamale storefront itself, next door to the company’s existing handmade tamale HQ. You should be able to pick it out quickly — it’s the one with the Alamo-like facade:
NEGOTIATING THE FIRST WARD FOR LAWYERS The new owner of Gravitas says the new partnership that recently bought the Taft St. restaurant from chef Scott Tycer plans to open a combination “gourmet sandwich grill, American craft beer garden and bourbon cocktail bar” suitable for “young attorneys and businessmen” at the corner of Houston Ave. and Crockett St.: “The lease on the location is still under negotiation, but [Stephen] Ross says the future design features indoor/outdoor space with garage doors, decks in the front and back, a bocce court and possibly lawn bowling.” [Culturemap]
The endcap restaurant space on the River Oaks Village strip center just west of Kirby that’s currently home to Tony Mandola’s but before that was Fins and before that Rickshaw and Bambu — but that’s still probably familiar to more people as that “No Parking Here for Chuy’s” place — will have a new name over the door soon. Ouisie’s Table owner Elouise Adams Jones plans to open a yet-to-be-named “new American-style bistro” at 2810 Westheimer in September. Tony Mandola’s will escape to its new Waugh Dr. building as soon as it’s ready this summer, after spending only a few months in what the restaurant officially calls its “miracle location.” (Tony Mandola’s Gulf Coast Kitchen closed its longtime location in the River Oaks Shopping Center at the end of its lease in January. A high-foreheaded Brasserie 19 is open in that space now.)
Photo: LoopNet
A narrow 3-story restaurant space is planned for this long-vacant lot on Travis St. between Prairie and Preston, right next to Frank’s Pizza and Cabo’s. Plans submitted with a variance application for “Milli Place” show most of the seating would be on the second and third floors, each of which would have outdoor patio space. Why the variance? So the building can take advantage of an extra foot of width, and spread a full 31 feet along Travis St. We’ve squeezed in those narrow floor plans below:
There’ll be a West-U-ish Molina’s Cantina location for the first time in 3 years — once the Tex-Mex chain opens up its new digs in one of the spaces left after the twin Terlingua Texas Border Cafe flameouts in March. Molina’s will go into Terlingua’s Braes Heights Shopping Center space on Bellaire near Stella Link. The last West U Molina’s, on Buffalo Speedway, closed down 3 years ago to make way for H-E-B’s Buffalo Market.
In other on-the-ashes-of-failed-restaurants news, the former Sabetta Cafe space at 2411 South Shepherd near Fairview is now the home of recently opened performance-art venue Greatfull Taco.
Photo of future Molina’s Cantina location, 3801 Bellaire Blvd.: West University Examiner
Is that just an old wall going the way of all stucco on the vacant former Felix Mexican Restaurant space at Westheimer and Grant? Or is architect Michael Hsu’s rehab of the space — which will turn it into a Houston outpost of Tyson Cole’s Uchi and Uchiko juggernaut from Austin, plus a few other lease spaces — already in progress? Candace Garcia’s brief photo report on one piece of the Great Lower Westheimer Restaurant Rejiggering, below:
Woodland Heights hangout King Biscuit Patio Cafe closed its doors on Saturday night. Sources tell Swamplot that cafe owner Roger Aggoun’s lease was not renewed. Now b4-u-eat is reporting that building owner Pat Quinn — who opened the place at 1606 White Oak in 1982 but later sold it — plans to team up with the former owner of Fitzgerald’s to reopen the restaurant. Sara Fitzgerald retired last year from running the live-music venue at the other end of White Oak; she opened Fitzgerald’s in 1977.
Photo: Renny Glover
THE LEFTOVERS AT PHIL’S TEXAS BARBECUE 
Katharine Shilcutt at the Houston Press confirms what readers have been telling us: that Phil’s Texas Barbecue closed for good on Tuesday, leaving behind a large and now-vacant BBQ-and-picnic-style spread at the intersection of Heights Blvd. and Washington Ave. Former energy executive Phil Stephenson did manage to leave the corner a fair bit cleaner than the way he found it: Carving a 7,000-sq.-ft. restaurant space out of the former Southwest Muffler and Brake building took 9 months. Phil’s opened last June. [Eating Our Words, via Twitter; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Houston Foodie
