02/19/09 11:47am

So what’s new?

  • Opening: There’s a big new Gallery Furniture taking over the old Pier One space in the Post Oak Shopping Center, across from the Galleria. Isiah Carey notes that there’s a (much smaller) “coming soon” sign out front. Also coming to the strip from Mattress Mack: a new and more upscale Kreiss Furniture store, where Pier One Kids used to be.
  • Closed: Paulie’s restaurant reports receiving an undisclosed “offer we couldn’t refuse” to close its Holcombe at Kirby location, and dutifully complied on Monday. The original Paulie’s, on Westheimer at Driscoll, will remain open.
  • Hoping to Spread: And Katharine Shilcutt reports that Otilia’s Mexican restaurant, the longtime Long Point standout, now “a bastion of the upper class yuppies who reside quietly in the nearby Memorial Villages and wash down their rice and beans with bottles of Merlot,” isn’t closing, despite rumors she had heard. But:

    it turns out instead that Otilia’s is actively seeking to franchise their restaurant. A bright sign by the register blinked this advertisement every five seconds as we ate, while the waitresses sullenly confirmed this fact.

Then there’s that Main St. mulch . . .

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

12/08/08 2:43pm

An awful stench has been wafting through the homes of Golden Glade Estates, just west of Hobby Airport and south of Sims Bayou. There’s also been backyard flooding after every rain, a constant din from trucks, and generator-powered lighting beaming into local Living Rooms during the night. The cause? Huge piles of wood debris, brought into the southeast Houston neighborhood after Hurricane Ike:

Their problems started when Federal Emergency Management Agency contractors began trucking in hundreds of semi truckloads of pungent smelling, steaming mulch. Local 2 Investigates cameras and Sky 2 helicopter footage show some mounds stacked taller than nearby homes, covering acres of land less than 100 yards from some homes.

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY