Tag: Restaurants

Demolitions
07/19/18 4:00pm

Montrose Blvd. Burger King Now Completely Ground Up Ahead of Coming Shake Shack Shakeup

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Hyde Park, Montrose, Restaurants
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In other abandoned Montrose restaurant news: crews have finished smashing up the Burger King on Westheimer a block west of Montrose Blvd., leaving the property in fast food limbo ahead of its planned takeover by Houston’s fourth Shake Shack location. Pictured above is the restaurant’s drive-thru lane minus the accompanying drive-thru infrastructure.

A Cherry Demolition excavator is still picking through scraps left behind from the teardown; they’re now spread out atop the former building’s foundation, visible below:

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Nothing-Burger
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Adaptive Reuse
07/19/18 2:00pm

Meet Railway Heights: The New Wash Ave Food Hall and Beer Garden with a 600-Car Automated Garage Out Back

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Proposed Developments, Redevelopment, Restaurants, Retail, Timbergrove, Warehouse Space
16 Comments

The owners of the 22,860-sq.-ft. warehouse at the bend where Wash Ave becomes Hempstead Rd. have plans to refashion the building as Houston’s latest food hall, complete with 25-plus restaurant tenants, a few grocery and trinket vendors, and an adjacent beer garden — all fronting 22,000-sq.-ft.-worth of park space. Aside from homonymous salad bar concept Let Us, no specific tenants have been announced for the space yet — formerly home to the Emmett Perry oriental rug store and Sugar Creek Interiors’ design studio. But the developer hints that most food stalls at Railway Heights will be of the fresh-never-frozen variety, staffed by “the farmer who reared the animal, the fisherman who caught the fish, the baker who baked the bread.”

Later on, plans call for a 600-car automatic parking garage (about 2-and-a-half-times the size of that other robo-valet proposed next to Tacos A Go Go on White Oak) to be added on to the site at 8200 Washington, along with a complex of “container apartments” in the southeast corner of the things. Along with the food hall, they’ll all go in the area marked red in the map above, across the train tracks from InTown Homes’ forthcoming Cottage Grove Lake community.

The map below shows how the site will layout in greater detail:

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On the Timbergrove Menu
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Featured Posts
07/16/18 5:00pm

Former McGowen Cleaners Now Looks More Vibrant as Restaurant Redo Takes Shape

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Hyde Park, Montrose, Renovations, Restaurants
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A row of 3 tall windows now opens up the Fairview-St.-side of the former McGowen Cleaners, currently being converted into a health-minded restaurant dubbed Vibrant on the corner of Morse St. As for a patio shown cut into the building’s windowed corner in earlier renderings from architect Lake Flato — it’s yet to be installed. But a bunch of other outdoor features such as shrubs, grasses, and the beds that hold them are now in place outside the structure.

They’ve taken over the frontage previously occupied by chopped-up pavement:

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Hyde Park
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Featured Posts
07/13/18 10:00am

Your Odds of Winning a Year’s Supply of Chicken Sandwiches at Chick-fil-A’s Next Pearland Grand Opening

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Openings and Closings, Pearland, Quicklink, Restaurants
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YOUR ODDS OF WINNING A YEAR’S SUPPLY OF CHICKEN SANDWICHES AT CHICK-FIL-A’S NEXT PEARLAND GRAND OPENING One in 1,365, a little slimmer than the chance of landing heads on a coin toss 10 times in a row. The Chick-fil-A in question, Pearland’s fifth, opens at Hwy. 288 and Aldine-Fort Bend Rd. on July 25, and in keeping with custom, the store is giving away 52 free #1 meals (chicken sandwich, medium Waffle Potato Fries, and a medium drink) to a group of 100 lucky loyalists selected from those who spend the night before camped out at the location, reports the Chronicle’s Dana Burke. This time though, the franchise is taking measures to ensure that only hometown competitors 18-and-up get access to the prize by limiting eligibility by zip code. The challengers: 77584, 77581, 77588, 77578, 77048, and 77047 — home to 136,500 legal adult residents of Pearland, Brookside Village, Shadow Creek Ranch, Manvel, and parts of Southeast Houston including Crestmont. To keep things competitive, reports Burke: “All participants must remain in their designated spots the entire time, with the exception of bathroom breaks.” [Houston Chronicle] Photo of 2016 Chick-fil-A First 100 event in Prestonwood, Texas: Chick-fil-A

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Featured Posts
07/12/18 12:00pm

Burgerim Now Has the Proper Credentials To Log In to Shepherd Center

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Renovations, Restaurants, Upper Kirby
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Update: A Swamplot reader notes that Burgerim originated in Israel — and that in Hebrew, the suffix “-im” adds a plural meaning to the word it ends. Read with that grammar in mind, the restaurant’s name translates roughly to “burgers.”

Although Burgerim’s previous attempts to come online next to Subway in the corner of the strip center at Richmond and Shepherd were met with red tags from city inspectors, those notices have now been taken down — reports an employee at the neighboring Honey Art Cafe — and a building permit filed yesterday grants the new instant-messenger-themed restaurant clearance to proceed with renovations to the space.

Previous high-tech retailers in the endcap include Clear Wireless and Wireless Toyz; analogue merchandiser Gold and Silver Buyers held the place down in between their tenures and Mattress Overstock retired from the space most recently, at the end of last year. When the burger place opens, it’ll be the franchise’s first inner-Loop spot, topping off its existing Cypress and W.-Lake-Houston-at-Beltway-8 locations.

Photo: Fox E.

Strip Steak
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East End
07/11/18 4:45pm

Raw Pink N. York Corner Now Blackened, Branded as Victorian’s Barbecue’s New Brick-and-Mortar Home

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Renovations, Restaurants
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Victorian’s Barbecue has now made its mark at 19 N. York St., including a bovine play on that lovable Austin mural; it’s featured on the East End building’s McAshan-St.-side. The former food truck business put its vehicle up on Craiglist last month and began blackening the exterior of the stationary spot it plans to take over.

Both its street-fronting sides started out pink (as shown above), with some green in the rear:

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Keep East End Werid
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Featured Posts
07/03/18 5:00pm

Awesome Bites Will Take a Chunk Out of Shops at Sawyer Yards’ West Side

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First Ward, Restaurants, Sawyer Yards
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Coming soon to the west side of the warehouse-turned-Shops at Sawyer Yards building on the corner of Sawyer and Edwards streets: Awesome Bites, a health-minded bakery specializing in fruit- and vegetable-based muffins made without eggs, butter, or milk. A building permit filed last Friday for the strip at 2313 Edwards — the nearer building in the photo above — has the new 1,600-sq.-ft. venue slotted into suite 185. That puts it west of Pokeology in either the box labelled B above (where B&B Butchers once left its mark but never materialized) or potentially right next door to the raw fishery — if the adjacent, yet-to-be announced taco shop’s plans fall through.

Images: Lovett Commercial

First Ward
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Audubon Place
07/02/18 10:00am

Texadelphia’s Takeover of the Wooden Box on Montrose Blvd. Now Nearly Complete

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Montrose, Openings and Closings, Quicklink, Renovations, Restaurants
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TEXADELPHIA’S TAKEOVER OF THE WOODEN BOX ON MONTROSE BLVD. NOW NEARLY COMPLETE With construction on Houston’s second Texadelphia now wrapping up ahead of its planned opening, it appears the restaurant’s remodelers have opted to preserve the woodsy exterior decor originally added onto the end of the strip center just shy of 2 years ago — when the storefront switched over from Berryhill Baja Grill to Yucatan Taco Stand. That gives the restaurant a different outward character than the chain’s only other Houston location — its first step back into the city after and 2-year absence — on the corner of Westheimer and Dunvale Rd. Over there, renovations stopped short of any exterior work as well (save for the installation of the brand’s signage in place of longtime tenant Potbelly Sandwich Shop’s), leaving the restaurant to pick up in a pale stucco endcap that’d been unchanged for over a decade. [Previously on Swamplot] Photo: Swamplox inbox

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Featured Posts
06/29/18 2:45pm

Former Starbucks Across Richmond from Current Starbucks Slated for Pacific Poke Transformation

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Galleria, Restaurants, Retail
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Pacific Poke is the latest newcomer to Houston’s booming raw fish restaurant scene, and it’s taking over the empty 1,802-sq.-ft. spot on Richmond once occupied by Starbucks, next to what’s now Roostar Vietnamese Grill. The Starbucks location — shown above —  closed down shortly before a brand-new Starbucks showed up across the street from it, just east of Chimney Rock in early 2016.

That left the building briefly vacant before Roostar arrived the following year in the spot next door to the abandoned coffee shop — now slated for a redo. Its Vietnamese restaurant space is shown below, done up with the 2-location chain’s abstract poultry-like logo:

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Raw Seafood Chaser
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Featured Posts
06/19/18 5:15pm

New Otto’s Barbecue To Plant Restaurant and Catering Complex Where Luke’s Icehouse Bit the Dust on Durham

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Proposed Developments, Restaurants, Washington Corridor
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Coming soon to the block across Durham from W Grill, just south of Washington: Otto’s Barbecue & Catering. The 67-year-old chain has plans for its first standalone location since the original on Memorial Dr. was sold in 2009 (for less than its owners felt it should’ve been) and demolished to make way for a collection of strip buildings.

Until last November, Luke’s Icehouse (pictured above) was the only structure standing in the way of the planned new restaurant on the corner of Lillian St. and Durham — but after shuttering last June, its building was torn down 5 months later. The rendering above shows Otto’s taking over the site from the north above Durham, where a courtyard fronts a covered patio adjacent to a parking lot.

Inside, the site plan indicates that 3,293-sq.-ft. would be devoted to the restaurant, while 1,722 would make up an attached catering kitchen:

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Smoke Signals
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Featured Posts
06/18/18 10:45am

New Restaurant from B&B Butchers Owner Now Shacking Up in Caddy Shack’s Abandoned Space Across Wash Ave

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Renovations, Restaurants, Washington Corridor
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B&B Butchers owner Benjamin Berg has a new restaurant in the works for the former Caddy Shack Bar & Grill building pictured at top, across the street from his existing venue’s parking lot on Wash Ave and 2-doors down from the redone building now housing Gus’s Fried Chicken. An entity connected to Berg filed a permit last Friday to prep 1809 Washington for the new business it’ll host, dubbed Cafe Lemon.

Caddy Shack (not to be confused with Candy Shack, the drive-through daiquiri spot 2 miles west on Washington) debuted in the 1,968-sq.-ft. structure 6 years ago following the Broken Spoke Cafe’s shutdown and posthumous fire. After a brief stint as Turkey Leg Hut — a Cajun restaurant which brought hookahs to the patio pictured above — the space rebranded back to Caddy Shack before shuttering for good around the end of last year.

Photos: Gil G. (Caddy Shack); Te Y. (patio)

Cafe Lemon
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Featured Posts
06/15/18 10:45am

Seabrook Hubcap Grill Brings New Headlight, Paintjob, Full Wheel Alignment to Former Red Door Cafe

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Renovations, Restaurants, Seabrook
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The Red Door Cafe’s red door remains at 1918 E. NASA Pkwy., but Hubcap Grill has refashioned the rest of the space into something more chop-shop chic: a new paintjob sets off the chrome appointments now covering the once-white front facade and a new headlamp illuminates the door. There’s also BURGERS on the grille above the entrance.

But that’s just the bodywork. The interior got a full remodel, too, including new floors, appliances, AC, electrical, and this custom chandelier:

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Auto Body Transformation
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Featured Posts
06/12/18 11:00am

First Seaside Texadelphia Slated for Former Ocean Grille & Beach Bar on Seawall Blvd.

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Galveston, Proposed Developments, Quicklink, Restaurants
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FIRST SEASIDE TEXADELPHIA SLATED FOR FORMER OCEAN GRILLE & BEACH BAR ON SEAWALL BLVD. “Unobstructed Gulf of Mexico views,” will complement the food at the newest nearby location of Texas cheese-steak chain Texadelphia, situated right on the corner of Seawall Blvd. and 13th St. in Galveston, reports the HBJ’s Jen Para. The restaurant is picking up where Ocean Grille & Beach Bar left off in that spot when it shuttered 2 years ago, leaving behind a main building as well as the outdoor bar pictured above — and an even beachier Tiki hut structure with patio seating beneath it. How will Texadelphia make use of the existing amenities in this, its first ocean-adjacent spot? Its one corporate-owned, landlocked Houston location sprung up in Briar Meadow at 8383 Westheimer last October, bookending a 2-year hiatus the brand had taken from the city and its surroundings. It’s now mounting a three-pronged return: Earlier this year, it signed another lease for the spot in the Hawthorne Square Shopping Center that Yucatan Taco Stand vacated last year. [HBJ; previously on Swamplot] Photo of Ocean Grille & Beach Bar’s bar: Katya C.

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Featured Posts
06/05/18 10:30am

Turkish Restaurant Transformation Now Taking Place Across Westheimer from Agora

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Montrose, Proposed Developments, Renovations, Restaurants, Retail
2 Comments

A new eatery is on its way to the Montrose shop called Montrose at 1723 Westheimer, a block west of Dunlavy. The toponymic women’s clothing boutique had about a 3-year run in the space before it went out of business, leaving the building vacant. Just last week, the developers behind the coming Eastern European restaurant filed plans with the city to remodel the 1,830-sq.-ft. structure into something more Turkish and culinary: Cafe Bosphorus. A banner hung up on the left storefront window store heralds its arrival.

Photos: Hipster Hotspots (Montrose Shop); Cafe Bosphorus (sign)

Cafe Bosphorus
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Buying and Selling
05/21/18 1:00pm

Greased Lightning Burger Building Now on the North Montrose Menu

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Montrose, North Montrose, Restaurants
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The owners of the hamburger, Mexican food, barbecue, and fish restaurant on the northwest corner of Taft and Peden — dubbed “Greased Lightning Pit Stop” by the sign hanging on it for over a decade — have listed it for sale at $750,000. Also included in the offer: the storefront adjacent to it and a run-down bungalow diagonally behind the restaurant.

The bungalow sits on a separate, 5,000-sq.-ft. lot beyond the fence shown below:

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Taft and Peden
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