PO’ BOYS PRICED OUT OF THE VILLAGE 
The Antone’s Import Co. on the corner of Dunstan and Kelvin in the Rice Village shut down last week, says the Houston Press: “Sources indicate that rent in the space — next door to Kelvin Arms and benjy’s — had increased to the point where Antone’s finally had to close down and reconcentrate on its Stella Link location.” [Eating Our Words] Photo: West University Examiner
Sign up for the Newsletter
Tag: Openings and Closings
YOUR FEEDBACK WAS IMPORTANT TO US 
The Borders “nothing held back” liquidation sale has brought out a slew of not-so-well wishers to the Galleria store, Jef Rouner finds: “The clerks told us that a pretty significant amount of customers had come in to gloat about the liquidation prices, scold the clerks for bad business practices, harp about how Borders got just what was coming to it, and finally, openly mock the soon to be un-employees.” [Art Attack; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Flickr user e_walk [license]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: BORDERS BIDS YOU ADIEU “Do what I did at my store when they announced it was liquidating in February. Immediately unplug the wi-fi router. Immediately section-off the cafe with caution tape. Immediately move all of the seating off the sales floor. This isn’t the time to lounge around, it’s the time to buy shit and get the fuck out. It’s also not the place to take your morning shit anymore, so make sure to also permanently close the restrooms to the public.” [Chris, commenting on Borders Liquidation Sales Begin]
The silver apple went up late last week on the enormous new Houston Food Bank location carved out of the former Sysco Foods warehouse at 535 Portwall St., just northwest of the I-10 East-610 Loop intersection. The 310,000-sq.-ft. facility will include a cafe, a community room and training center that’s open to the public, and a volunteer program called Serving for Success that’s open to inmates and probationers. The organization hopes to use its new space to double the amount of food it distributes (to 120 million lbs. a year) by 2018. Official opening date: September 23rd.
Whatever steak and ale was left in this building at 2425 Mangum Rd. has been taken off . . . very slowly. Only to be brought back in a new form: A reader who’s noted some heavy construction — including the covering-up of windows — at this former restaurant on the southwest side of 290 over the last month and a half says the new occupants appeared to have applied for a liquor license under the name “Mangum Steakhouse.” Actual name of the new joint: Sunset Strip, a “totally latex free” club where you’ll find “the hottest entertainers in H-Town” — once they’re hired, of course. Scheduled opening date: August 3rd. Any resemblance between Highway 290 and the actual Sunset Strip, of course, is courtesy of the ghost of Anna Nicole Smith, and the Pleasures she left behind on the other side of the freeway at 34th St.
- Sunset Strip
- Sunset Strip – Houston [Backpage]
Photo: LoopNet
BORDERS LIQUIDATION SALES BEGIN 
Starting today: going-out-of-business sales at all Borders bookstore locations nationwide, including the 6 hereabouts: on West Alabama at Kirby, in Meyerland Plaza, in the Galleria, in The Woodlands, Webster, and at IAH. Books-A-Million is in talks with the bankrupt chain to assume the leases and inventory of as many as 30 Borders locations, but none of them are in Houston. The only possible Texas takeover on the list is in San Antonio. [Washington Post] Photo: Pedro Vit
Ever wonder what happens when a vat of liquid nitrogen wielded by a restaurant crew from Tomball is poured into the swimming pool of a Downtown Houston hotel? Your curiosity will be rewarded in the short video above from last March’s poolside Houston Star Chefs event at the Four Seasons Hotel, where Bootsie’s Heritage Cafe chef Randy Rucker and pastry chef Chris Leung both received Rising Star awards. The large-scale chemistry demo from Bootsie’s took place at the end of the evening. (According to Houston Press food critic Katharine Shillcutt, there were a few delayed reactions too: The hotel was left with a fair amount of cleanup afterward as a result, including completely draining the pool and fixing the chemical balance of the water.) The Bootsie’s crew’s latest project: A new restaurant in a well-vegetated just-purchased 1930 Museum District home most recently used as a doctor’s office, directly behind Yoshio Taniguchi’s Asia House at 5219 Caroline St.:
The almost here, the already here, and the soon-to-be-departed:
- Opening Soon: City inspection issues having been conquered, Hubcap Grill‘s new Heights-ish outpost in Shady Acres is now aiming for an opening “mid/late” next week, tweets burger-slinger Ricky Craig. The converted drive-up at 1133 W. 19th St. is just around the corner from Cedar Creek. Plenty more patio seating in back.
- Already Open: So sorry you missed the christenings, but the nightclub, restaurant-bar, and wading pool carved out of the former Settegast Kopf funeral home at 3320 Kirby, have been open and holding events for a week or 2 already. That place wearing its paneling on the outside is Hendricks Pub and Eatery. Roak is the nightclub; the atrium pool has its own name: Rush. The bars and their neighbors in the David Crockett subdivision immediately to the west will have plenty of time to become acquainted with each other before their court date next May. Some local residents have filed suit against the bars’ owners, claiming the clubs are in violation of local deed restrictions:
SHOCKED TO FIND THAT GAMBLING IS GOING ON IN HERE 
Four people believed to be the owners of the Capri Game Room at 10418 Telephone Rd. (just north of Fuqua) were arrested recently on misdemeanor gambling-related charges, Craig Malisow reports. Across the street from the Capri is an HPD substation, and inside the structure, surrounded by a sea of blue-painted walls, are 122 video slot machines. The arrests have had a ripple effect on several other nearby game rooms, but Malisow is confident the changes will be temporary: “In a strip center just up the road, two others have closed. But the Just Gold game room a few hundred yards from the Capri is still open. The owner, Lourdes Rodriguez, is just one of many game room owners with landlords who won’t ask any questions as long as the rent is paid every month. While Just Gold, and this stretch of Telephone Road, is quiet for right now, the heat will blow over as it always does, and things will get back to normal. The promise of big money might just be an illusion for the suckers who play, but for the owners and vendors, the money is very real indeed.” [Houston Press] Photo: LoopNet
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE RESTAURANT RUSH IN SHADY ACRES “Given the success of hugely popular Cedar Creek just down the street…and the new Hubcap Grille opening about a block away on 19th…and Gatlin’s BBQ…and the new spot opening soon on 23rd…I’d say this part of town has a hungry (and thirsty!) population who will ensure that this new Corkscrew location does well. Welcome to the neighborhood – very happy to have you here!” [LaLa, commenting on The Corkscrew Pops Open in Shady Acres]
This building at 3951 San Felipe, just west of Willowick, may have started out as a gas station, but it’s also spent time as a cleaners and most recently was a bank. Since its soft opening last week, it’s been Relish Fine Foods, a small new market for the River Oaks crowd, specializing in natural and seasonal gourmet food, with shout-outs to local vendors. There’s still plenty of room to fill the wide-open 2,300-sq.-ft. interior with more merchandise, reports photographer Candace Garcia. (More than the current deli and olive bars may show up before the official opening next week.) But where better to start a little Houston grocery that supports the slow food movement than in this drive-up-friendly grab-and-go location? Parking-lot-facing sandwich munchers, there’s even a marble bar set up along the west front of the building set up just for you:
Reopened in a new location over the weekend, after a year or so of mellowing: wine bar and former Washington Ave nightlife pioneer The Corkscrew. That mysterious Heights location turns out to be in Shady Acres, in the former strip-center Washateria at 1308 W. 20th St., where there’s now this patio out front.
- Welcome [The Corkscrew]
- Previously on Swamplot: The Rush to White Oak: Is the Corkscrew Next?, Here Come Bee Love and Special Sauce: The Corkscrew Twists Itself Into Something Hard and Fruity
Photo: Candace Garcia
In the new but apparently burgeoning tradition of Swamplot opening-day (and opening-night) photos of Waugh Dr. parking lots comes this reader photo of the car-filled scene behind the new Tony Mandola’s Gulf Coast Kitchen at 1212 Waugh, taken from Rosine St. last night around 7 pm. Sure, residents of the Piedmont condos along Rosine now can walk to the new Whole Foods Market. But the condos “have no guest parking other than on the street. Now we will have NO guest parking at all,” reports the reader. “People are steamed.” Next on the local agenda: trying to swing permit-only parking signs for Rosine.
- About Tony Mandola’s [Tony Mandola’s]
- Previously on Swamplot: Westheimer Strip-Center Hotspot: Rickshaw to Fins to Tony Mandola’s — to Something Ouisie’s, Tony Mandola Plants His Own Restaurant on Waugh
Photo: Swamplot inbox
Installed yesterday morning on the 3rd floor of the city’s new permit HQ and Green Resource Center at 1002 Washington Ave., which features dozens of other artworks: a text wall by Mary Margaret Hansen, the project’s lead artist. “Last spring, I filled entire yellow legal pads with transcriptions of real conversations, then got it all on a lengthy word document and finally edited it to phrases and expressions that best exemplify what happens when the city takes a look at a set of plans,” she writes. “Too wet! Mud in the beams. Call back when it dries up.” Also: “What about the fees?” and “I have lingering doubts.” Your favorites are all here. Or at least some of them:
“I don’t know about the Whole Foods parking lot,” writes a Swamplot reader, “but it’s certainly getting real on D’Amico!” Here’s a photo sent in with that report, taken just past the American General Center garage north of the new store on D’Amico St., shortly after 4 pm. But there was plenty of neighborhood-street spillover earlier, too: “Around lunch time, if there was a curb there was a car . . . on both sides along D’Amico, bumper to bumper from the light to just under the garage.” How long will this sort of thing keep up? Our tipster imagines AIG American General will soon put out no-parking signs “along any parts of the street that is their property, such as along the entrance to a parking lot across from whole foods and by the garage. Other areas on the campus have no parking signs where people tend to stop. I know you can’t park within a certain distance to a stop sign, does the same apply to stop lights? If so, some people risked a ticket just to get some groceries! It would be cheaper to pay for parking in the AIG lot or the garage visitor parking.” And no rush, folks. Those free chicken breast coupons are good until next Tuesday.
- Previously on Swamplot: Opening Day: It’s Getting Real Crowded at the Montrose Whole Foods Parking Lot, Beer, Wine, Art, and BBQ on Tap: Here’s Your New Whole Foods Market, Montrose, This Kind of Whole Foods Thing, Getting Real on Waugh at West Dallas This Weekend,
Photo: Swamplot inbox
