Tag: Bars and Restaurants

Restaurants, The Woodlands

A Swamplot reader sends these photos showing signage up a block north of the Waterway Ave. bridge in The Woodlands, where a new venue called Mahoney’s Texish Bar & Restaurant is picking up in place of Tsukiji Japanese Cuisine. The restaurant’s decision to mince words in its title, coupled with the presence of a shamrock on its logo suggests some sort of Texan-Irish fusion will be its focus. And according to trademark applications the restaurant’s filed this month, the phrase “We Are Texish,” and similar taglines will feature prominently on its employees uniforms.

Here’s what the space used to look like:

By the Waterway

77380, Bars and Restaurants, Signage, The Woodlands

East Downtown

10/05/18 2:00pm

Why All the Food Trucks Vanished from East Downtown’s Truck Yard

Quicklink, Restaurants

14 Comments

WHY ALL THE FOOD TRUCKS VANISHED FROM EAST DOWNTOWN’S TRUCK YARD Health department officials ousted all food trucks from the open-air structure pictured adjacent to outdoor seating in August — reports Samantha Morris over at Houston Food Finder — nearly 4 months after the Lamar St. bar opened. Their justification: City code bans food trucks from parking within 100 ft. of dining areas and from parking underneath â€œany canopy, awning or other covering,â€ that isnâ€™t attached to the truck itself. (If the coveringâ€™s already there for another purpose, and the truck just happens to park under it, the city lets it slide.) As a partial fix, â€œWeâ€™re going to take the roof off,â€ Truck Yardâ€™s general manager tells Morris. Until the city okays plans for that change, cheesesteaks from the barâ€™s in-house kitchen will be the only food source available. [Houston Food Finder; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Truck Yard Houston

77003, Bars and Restaurants, East Downtown, Food Trucks, Parking, Public Health, Quicklink

Audubon Place

10/02/18 1:30pm

Bacco’s Wine Garden’s Montrose Patio Has Uncorked

Bars and Clubs, Montrose, Openings and Closings

13 Comments

As advertised by the banner fronting Montrose Blvd., the wine bar and its outdoor drinking area are now open for business. Getting things ready inside the venue took a little longer than it did to set up fencing. After the bottles went up in late August, the front door of the former homeless shelter stayed closed to patrons for a little over a month.

Previously on Swamplot: Bacco’s Montrose Patio Gets Plastered with Hundreds of Wine Bottles To Celebrate Its TABC Approval; New Designated Drinking Pen Takes Over Old Youth Homeless Shelter Parking Lot on Montrose Blvd.; Whatâ€™s Behind the Bacco North Braeswood Backup; Sixties Ex-Dry Cleaning Spot To Be Made Over as a Brays-Side Wine Bar

Audubon Place

77006, Audubon Place, Bars and Restaurants, Openings and Closings

10/01/18 12:30pm

Moon Tower Inn’s Old Patio Is Now Completely Plowed Following the 3-Day Farewell Bender It Hosted Last Week

Renovations, Second Ward

3 Comments

Drink specials set the stage not only for what Moon Tower Inn billed as a â€œgluttonous celebrationâ€ of its 8-year anniversary 2 weeks ago, they also helped management get rid of all its inventory so that the venue could close down while workers install a new patio in place of its old one. Following 3 days of clearance festivities, the bar ran dry in the afternoon last Sunday — although some â€œcheap assâ€ food remained in stock until Friday, August 25, when it finally shut its doors. Now, a Swamplot reader sends the photo at top showing what used to be the Moon Tower’s covered patio transformed into an earthen field. From it, the new heated and cooled outdoor seating area will materialize with help from the equipment pictured above.

Itâ€™ll span the yard between the corner of Canal and North Ennis streets and the shipping container that architecture firm Kinetic Design Lab repurposed for the barâ€™s reopening in 2012:

3004 Canal St.

77003, Bars and Restaurants, Renovations, Second Ward

09/21/18 5:00pm

Wabash Feed & Garden’s Growth Spurt Sets the Scene for Nightlife

Renovations, Rice Military

5 Comments

Here’s what the former Wabash Feed & Garden Store on Washington looks like with a second level stacked on top of its original storefront. Workers are now climbing around the outdoor portions of the new upstairs, setting the scene for what’s coming next.

What exactly they’re planning hasn’t shown up in the form of any physical signage yet, but some digital breadcrumbs dug up by a HAIF poster hint at what they’ve got in mind. Two active Facebook pages — one for something called Warsaw Houston, the other for “Axis & Alibi” currently sport similar branding and claim Wabash’s address as their own. Late last year, another page with the title Van Nuys made its internet debut with a 5701 Washington address, too — but it’s since been taken offline.

5701 Washington

77007, Bars and Restaurants, Renovations, Rice Military

Avondale

09/18/18 3:00pm

Montrose Mining Company Sheds Its Back Patio as Part of Postino Wine Bar Redo

Bars and Clubs, Renovations

2 Comments

As heralded by strange sensations earlier this month, crews have begun transforming the former Montrose Mining Company into Houston’s second Postino Wine Bar by stripping the covered patio shown above from the building’s east side. So far, the rest of its gray brick exterior remains unchanged, except a portion of the facade on Grant St. that’s recently gone yellow as part of the redo:

805 Pacific St.

77006, Avondale, Bars and Restaurants, Renovations

East Downtown

09/18/18 12:00pm

Empty Leeland St. Furniture Workshop Now Has a Wine Sign on It

Quicklink, Signs

EMPTY LEELAND ST. FURNITURE WORKSHOP NOW HAS A WINE SIGN ON IT A reader tells Swamplot one of those TABC posters is up on the building at 3107 Leeland St., and the applicant it names: The Wine House, LLC. The last tenant Metamorphose Studios did double-duty in the 2,800-sq.-ft. space: dealing furniture and also guiding visitors in the art of refurbishing items themselves (“I recommend the chairapy class,” wrote the venue’s sole Yelp reviewer in 2016, adding that of the items for sale: “The hand painted and embellished cattle skulls are to die for!“) Despite its departure from Houston, the workshop lives on as part of an antique store up in Navasota. Photo: Metamorphose Studios

Bars and Restaurants, East Downtown, Proposed Developments, Quicklink, Retail, Signs

Avondale

09/04/18 4:00pm

Postino Wine Bar Is Getting All Tingly Again About Opening a New Location in an Old Building

Bars and Clubs, Montrose, Proposed Developments, Quicklink

1 Comment

POSTINO WINE BAR IS GETTING ALL TINGLY AGAIN ABOUT OPENING A NEW LOCATION IN AN OLD BUILDING Back in April, the Chronicleâ€™s Greg Morago reported that the management behind Postino Wine Bar â€œgot goosebumpsâ€ while checking out the portion of the old Pappas Restaurants complex off Yale St. that eventually became their debut Houston location in Heights Mercantile. Now, the sensation has come back to haunt them: â€œWalking into the old Montrose Mining Company â€“ such a storied space thatâ€™s been a neighborhood gathering space since the 1970s â€“ gave us goosebumps,â€ the chainâ€™s owner tells him. And so: Renovations will begin soon to bring the longtime gay bar at 805 Pacific St. back into service as Houstonâ€™s second Postino. The venueâ€™s former proprietor Charles Armstrong sold it to a group overseen by Fred Sharifi â€” the owner of the neighboring Baba Yega Cafe â€” in January, following the barâ€™s shutdown in 2016. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Swamplox inbox

77006, Avondale, Bars and Restaurants, Montrose, Proposed Developments, Quicklink

Audubon Place

08/23/18 12:15pm

Bacco’s Montrose Patio Gets Plastered with Hundreds of Wine Bottles To Celebrate Its TABC Approval

Bars and Clubs, Montrose, New Construction

6 Comments

The aftermath of Bacco’s Wine Garden’s latest design choice at 3611 Montrose Blvd. has the place looking a little less like a homeless shelter and more like a bar.Â Empty bottles were as close as the venue could get to the real thing before its TABC license got approved on Tuesday. Now that that’s all squared away, real booze will be stored inside.

It’s a marketing strategy similar to the one Postino employed with the bright yellow wine promos hung up on its Heights Mercantile patio before it opened. Except by the looks of their attachment, these reds, whites — and even a few proseccos — are here to stay.

They line the bar’s fencing all the way out to the sidewalk:

The Pre-Game

77006, Audubon Place, Bars and Restaurants, Montrose, New Construction, Patios

Audubon Place

08/09/18 5:15pm

New Designated Drinking Pen Takes Over Old Youth Homeless Shelter Parking Lot on Montrose Blvd.

Bars and Clubs, Montrose, Renovations

1 Comment

Houston’s latest Bacco-branded wine venue Bacco’s Wine Garden has begun its takeover of 3611 Montrose Blvd. by adding this corral to the house’s front parking lot, although nothing’s being consumed on site yet; a TABC application is still pending approval. Now enclosed within the pen: the gable-roofed sign once colored by the logo for Tony’s Place, the homeless center for LGBT youth under 26 that relocated last summer to a Midtown space it shares with the Salvation Army’s own youth shelter on McGowen St.

On the north side of the building, Bacco’s’s own sign is now up:

Bacco’s Wine Garden

77006, Audubon Place, Bars and Restaurants, Montrose, Renovations

Adaptive Reuse

08/06/18 2:15pm

Former Harrisburg Dry Cleaners Now Getting Its Feet Wet with New Bar Tenant as Part of Planned Redo

Bars and Clubs, Redevelopment

5 Comments

Note: This story has been updated.

The first tenant slated for the soon-to-be redone Imperial Linen & Cleaners building a block west of the Green Line’s Coffee Plant/2nd Ward stop is now on its way there courtesy of Mike Sammons, one of the partners behind Midtown’s 13 Celsius, Mongoose vs Cobra, and Weights + Measures. A TABC notice is up on the building, reports a keen HAIF user, and last month an entity linked to Sammons called How To Survive on Land and Sea LLC filed plans to start converting 2,371 sq.-ft. of interior room into a bar.

That’ll still leave lots of space for the other attractions that developer Jeff Kaplan wants to usher into the 19,969-sq.-ft. structure shown above that he’s now calling the Plant at Harrisburg.Â (One of them would’ve been Xela Coffee Roasters; it announced plans to move into the building in 2016 but has since rerouted to an forthcoming spot on Canal St., 5 blocks west of Lockwood) Before Kaplan made public his intention to transform the former cleaners, it played host to an art space that presented “visual art, literary readings and guided meditations; in the interest of, open-minded exploration of the transubstantiative properties of art and space.”

That creative endeavor is over — but speaking of transubstantiation, new windows shown above fronting both the south and west sides of the building will reopen its planned retail spaces to look out on Harrisburg and Sampson St. like they used to:

Plant at Harrisburg

77003, Adaptive Reuse, Bars and Restaurants, Redevelopment, Retail, Second Ward

Framed Animal Portraiture Heralds Slowpokes’ Fall Migration to Levy Park

Restaurants, Signage, Upper Kirby

There’s now some still life clinging to the Kirby Grove office building across from Levy Park where Slowpokes plans to debut its second location sometime this fall. Already open in the 16-story buildingâ€™s ground floor: Kiran’s Indian restaurant and a branch of PlainsCapital Bank — whose ATM you can make out to the left of the exhibition wall in the photo above.

From their current vantage point, each of the 3 framed faces — mainstays at the cafe’s original Garden Oaks location — will have a good view of the park across the street as they wait for the new restaurant to take shape:

Garden Oaks to Kirby Grove

77098, Bars and Restaurants, Levy Park, Signage, Upper Kirby

07/17/18 12:45pm

New Spaghetti Warehouse Owner Wants To Crack Open Its Soggy Lower Levels for Open-Air Eating Area, Shove Bar Above It

Downtown, Redevelopment, Restaurants

10 Comments

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

77002, Bars and Restaurants, Downtown, Flooding, Redevelopment

07/11/18 9:30am

What’s on Tap Across from the MATCH

Midtown, New Construction, Quicklink