03/31/08 5:46pm

Houston Premium Outlets, Cypress, TX

Reader photos and reports from the Houston Premium Outlets opening on 290 last weekend:

I had heard somewhere that the mall was supposed to have a Southwest theme, but with all the logos plastered over the entrance towers, it looks like they might have been aiming for Early NASCAR. Aside from that, though, it’s a surprisingly nice place. Yeah, there were lots of people there, but once you get out of your car, the mall handles crowds well. It’s much nicer than a lot of Houston non-outlet malls, and a whole lot less cheesy or pretentious.

After the jump: those logo-festooned towers and more on-the-spot pix! Plus: Chicken Now: Here. Now!

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03/25/08 7:12pm

Houston Premium Outlets, Cypress, Texas

Update: On-the-spot reader reports!

Fairfield residents: You picked the right location! Just outside your neighborhood’s front gates, a huge new outlet mall is scheduled to open . . . in just two days!

What’s going to be there? The Ecko Unltd. outlet store! The Juicy Couture outlet store! The Under Armour outlet store! Jody Maroni’s Sausage Kingdom! And Chicken Now! They’re all opening this Thursday, March 27th!

Well . . . almost. As a commenter on HAIF points out, you’ll apparently have to wait for Chicken Now, which on the Houston Premium Outlets website is listed only as “opening soon.” The site indicates 100 stores in the 427,000-square-foot outdoorish highwayside complex will be ready for this weekend’s grand opening. 13 more are slated to open later.

After the jump: you’ll look askance at the plans!

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03/25/08 8:27am

La Strada Restaurant, 322 Westheimer, Houston

And yet another Lower Westheimer institution bites the dust. The Houston Business Journal reports that La Strada has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection:

According to documents, the restaurant filed as an emergency action after negotiating with the Texas Comptroller’s Office over a failure to pay past due taxes. A seizure notice was served and the restaurant faced immediate closure.

La Strada’s second location — on San Felipe — closed early last year.

Photo: Flickr user Pixeltopia

03/24/08 7:53am

Felix Mexican Restaurant on Westheimer, Houston

The Houston Press‘s Food Blog reports that the Felix Mexican Restaurant on Westheimer near Montrose has served its last enchilada. Finding the 60-year-old restaurant closed, patrons have been posting notes on the front door asking for an explanation.

More than three years ago, owner Felix Tijerina Jr., son of the Felix chain’s founder, reported to Marvin Zindler that the restaurant was about to go belly up. From a Houston Business Journal report in February 2005:

But ever since M-a-a-a-rvin broadcast the bombshell, legions of Felix groupies have descended upon the little faux hacienda for what might be a final nostalgic fix of Mexican treats drenched in cheese and chili.

Tijerina says his phone has been ringing off the hook with customers pleading with him to keep the restaurant open, and says he’s also received letters from patrons in San Antonio and as far away as North Carolina.

It worked for a while. This time, there were no media warnings.

After the jump, a look back at Felix’s place in Houston’s history (there used to be 6 locations!), plus a reprise of David Beebe’s Felix restaurant restoration concept!

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03/18/08 12:35pm

Rendering of Cullen’s Upscale American Grille on Space Center Blvd., Houston

A restaurant scheduled to open today just beyond Beltway 8’s southeastern elbow is the first “Certified Green Restaurant” in Houston approved by the Green Restaurant Association. Cullen’s Upscale American Grille completed 17 of the GRA’s environmental guidelines.

The grille’s proprietor is first-time restaurant owner Kevin Munz, who previously built a chain of 13 Houston-area pawn shops. He sold the Mr. Money Pawn shops to Cash America International in 2006. Two years before that, he bought 92.8 acres of undeveloped land at the eastern edge of Ellington Field and began planning Clearpoint Crossing, a series of strips along the west side of newly extended Space Center Blvd., featuring retail/lease space, a professional-office park, and a multifamily residential project.

Cullen’s is intended to be Clearpoint Crossing’s main attraction: a 37,000-sq.-ft. Las Vegas-style eatery with seven private dining rooms — including one built of glass and suspended over the main dining area — a ballroom, space for outdoor dining, and seating for 700 diners. Customers will have their choice of china: Wedgwood, Versace, or “the Titanic.” Munz spoke to the Houston Chronicle‘s David Kaplan about his plans for Cullen’s last year:

“I’ve been all over the U.S. and looked at restaurants. It’s the best of a bunch of different concepts and putting them into one, Munz said. “It’s the same thing I did with pawnshops.”

Munz told the South Belt-Ellington Leader he hopes to attract customers driving from as far northeast as Baytown and as far south as Galveston to his green restaurant, saying he “wouldn’t have done this in town.”

Munz expects the Clearpoint Crossing’s land value to “go up the day I open the restaurant,” he told Kaplan. That would be today!

After the jump, a plan of the whole Clearpoint Crossing development. Plus, a few of the restaurant’s green features!

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03/11/08 5:58pm

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJm4DykNPOg 400 330]

If only Marvin Zindler had lived to see this!

Houston’s longtime consumer reporter is no longer around to deliver his stirring “Slime in the Ice Machine!” reports on TV, but Harris County Public Health & Environmental Services is now allowing online access to its database of inspection reports for retail food establishments.

Though it’s not nearly as user-friendly as, say, being able to see letter grades in restaurant front windows, the ability to search through reports online is a big step forward. And hey, now that they’re available, maybe someone can turn distributing inspection report cards to county restaurants into a business.

If you’re on the prowl for ice-machine violations in the new database, maybe to put into your own Zindler-style restaurant-inspection broadcasts on YouTube, look for “Slime on soda nozzles, soda gun & holster, ice machine, yogurt machines” under inspection item 25, “Food Contact Surfaces of Equipment and Utensils Cleaned, Sanitized/Good Repair.”

02/27/08 1:01pm

El Torito Lounge, Harrisburg Blvd., Houston

Houston’s lone professional tourists, John Nova Lomax and David Beebe, stop off at the Brady’s Island in the Ship Channel midway into their latest day-long stroll . . . through this city’s southeastern stretches:

The air is foul here, and the eastern view is little more than a forest of tall crackers and satanic fume-belching smokestacks, sending clouds of roasted-cabbage-smelling incense skyward to Mammon, all bisected by the amazingly tall East Loop Ship Channel Bridge, its pillars standing in the toxic bilge where Brays Bayou dumps its effluent into the great pot of greenish-brown petro-gumbo.

While Brady’s Landing today seems to survive as a function room – a sort of Rainbow Lodge for the Ship Channel, with manicured grounds that reminded Beebe of Astroworld — decades ago, people came here to eat and to take in the view. This was progress to them, this horrifically awesome vista showed how we beat the Nazis and Japanese and how we were gonna stave off them godless Commies. As for me, it made me think of Beebe’s maxim: “Chicken and gasoline don’t mix.”

More from the duo’s march through “Deep Harrisburg”: Flag-waving Gulf Freeway auto dealerships, an early-morning ice house near the Almeda Mall, a razorwire-fenced artist compound in Garden Villas, Harold Farb’s last stand, colorful Broadway muffler joints, the hidden gardens of Thai Xuan, and — yes, gas-station chicken.

“There is nothing else like the Southeast side,” Lomax adds in a comment:

I see it as the true heart of Houston. Without the port and the refineries we are nothing. The prosperous West Side could be Anywhere, USA, but the Southeast Side could only be here.

Photo of El Torito Lounge on Harrisburg: John Nova Lomax and David Beebe

02/26/08 8:36am

Still from Video of The Titan, Randall Davis’s Proposed Condo Tower on Post Oak Blvd., Uptown, Houston

If you’re looking for clues to help you figure out what the McDonald’s on Post Oak is gonna look like when it gets rebuilt, the flashy new website for the Titan doesn’t help much. There’s a video that shows Randall Davis’s latest theme-heavy condo tower from all sorts of dramatic angles, but it never answers the question most of us have been asking since the project was announced last fall: How, exactly, is the drive-thru gonna fit next door?

Davis told the Houston Business Journal last September that the new McDonald’s would be a “long, skinny building” facing Post Oak, between the Titan and the new Alexan Post Oak apartments directly to the north. In the new video, though, there are no Golden Arches, and camera angles artfully block the most direct views of that portion of the building site.

There’s no mention of the McDonald’s on the Titan website. There is, however, a welcome second confirmation that another fine food establishment will be built down the street at Boulevard Place:

A newly planned Whole Foods Market, only half a block away, places hard to find gourmet items at your fingertips.

Okay, so it’s just advertising copy. But it’s recent!

After the jump, more views of the Titan — none of which show where the real Big Macs are gonna live.

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02/11/08 8:37am

Spicy Pickle Sub Shop, Las Vegas, NV

Isn’t this a big part of what makes Houston great? Anyone can move in here and . . . set up a chain of franchise sub shops! Coming soon to our city: 10 new Spicy Pickle sandwich stores. The local franchisee, Peter Forastiere, ran a related family business in Springfield, Massachusetts:

“I’ve always felt there were similarities between the restaurant business and the funeral home business,” Forastiere says. “People are very sensitive during a time of grief, and people are also very sensitive with what they put in their stomachs. The products may be different, but the customer service is very similar.”

Imagine how much better we could all have been eating here — if only SCI had realized this sooner.

Photo of Las Vegas Spicy Pickle: Flickr user purpletwinkie

01/03/08 5:59pm

McDonald's Sign at Night

We have an answer to last week’s reader question about the future of the Woodland Heights McDonald’s, at the corner of I-45 and North Main St., which was recently demolished. Miz Anonymous (“from the lovely and talented ‘Brooke Smith’ subdivision”) writes in:

Neighborhood prattle says that one of those new fancy McDonald’s, with earth tones, Wi-Fi and lounge areas, will be put up there. We’re calling it “McStarbucks.” Guess the McD franchise figures the neighborhood is going “up” after all. We hope that the 45-feeder bums will have to get their panhandled-dollar burgers somewhere else.

Another clue the burgers are coming back: the hood on the freeway-visible sign, which remains. If you haven’t visited the Willowbrook McDonald’s, see the prototype photos in this BusinessWeek slideshow.

Photo of McDonald’s sign: Flickr user Michael Schanbacher

12/28/07 7:42am

McDonald’s Sign at Night

A question from our email:

What is happening with the land that was the former McDonald’s on Main St at I45? I have seen no sign or other information that would explain plans for the site.

Got an answer for our reader? Send it in — to the Swamplot tips line. We’ll post the best responses next week.

Photo of McDonald’s sign: Flickr user Michael Schanbacher

12/17/07 10:31am

1911 Bagby St., Midtown, Houston

Earlier this month, Rhea Wheeler told the Houston Business Journal about his plans to open three restaurants in existing buildings in the greater downtown area: Gastropub Hearsay next to Market Square, a Texas cuisine restaurant called White House at Austin and Elgin in Midtown, and . . .

What was that third location? The HBJ wouldn’t say:

The company’s third location is a secret ingredient in the restaurant mix. Wheeler does not want to reveal the location of the large Midtown property, which was purchased two years ago, because he’s trying to buy the surrounding properties.

Below the fold: oops — where it is!

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12/13/07 3:01pm

Heights Village Parking Lot on Yale St., Houston Heights

Looks like a lot of pedestrian action going on in these marketing drawings for Orr Commercial’s new Heights Village, a five-acre restaurant, retail, office, and “upscale housing” development slated for the current site of the Sons of Hermann hall just south of I-10, between Heights Blvd. and Yale St. and an adjacent parcel abutting railroad tracks to the south.

Why, with all those people in the drawings walking to and fro, it looks like this development will have all the charm of a small old-town Main Street . . . or at the very least all the charm of an old small town that decided to build a multi-level parking garage, but still turned its Main Street into a parking lot anyway, just to hedge its bets.

After the jump: more parking-lot pedestrians!

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12/07/07 10:38am

Otto’s Bar B Que and Hamburgers on Memorial Dr., Houston

The owners of Otto’s Bar B Que and Hamburgers — a Houston institution since the early days of air conditioning — are retiring, closing up shop, tearing down their building at 5502 Memorial Dr., and putting it and the shopping center they own next door (including Biba’s Greek Pizza) up for sale, reports Allison Wollam in the Houston Business Journal:

Word of the end of Otto’s has already been circulating among customers, many of whom Sofka says are saddened to hear about the impending closure.

“If those people like it so much, where have they been?” she asks. “Why don’t they frequent our restaurant more? We still have our faithful that come in three times a week, but other than that, we’re stressing out each and every day to pay our bills.”

Maybe folks stopped coming by because there’s no chance they’ll run into Marvin Zindler there anymore? Anyway, it’s likely June and Marcus Sofka won’t have to stress about their bills for too much longer:

Real estate sources predict the land will sell for a minimum of $150 per square foot and say the highest and best use for the land would be a high-rise residential tower.

The Otto’ses in Sugar Land and Downtown are franchised, and will not be affected, reports Wollam, who also leaves us with this strange — but quintessentially Houstonish — image:

Another franchised Otto’s is scheduled to open next year in Chase Tower, and Sofka says the barbecue pits behind the original restaurant will be moved to the new Chase Tower location.

Photo: Flickr users Bob & Lorraine Kelly

12/04/07 11:04am

Former Twelve Spot Bar on Travis Street, Downtown Houston

Former Ibiza and Catalan investor Rhea Wheeler and two partners have bought the shuttered Twelve Spot bar on Travis St. — just around the corner from Market Square downtown — and will be turning it into a gastropub called Hearsay.

218 Travis is Houston’s second-oldest building, and originally served as a Confederate Army munitions depot. It’s a dramatic space inside: There are three stories, but the upper floors have been removed and a mezzanine placed in the back.

Wheeler told Jennifer Dawson of the Houston Business Journal he’ll open the new restaurant in the first half of next year.

After the jump: More Wheeler restaurant plans! In actual old buildings!

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