Last week, this sign showed up in the window at the old Sophia restaurant on W. Main and Mandell, indicating that something or someone called Faustian Bargain intends to serve Montrose some devil juice — er, liquor. Sophia closed here at the end of February, you’ll remember, and Café Artiste mysteriously disappeared several years before that. Some sleuthing by a Swamplot reader — later echoed by Eater Houston and Culturemap — turned up that 2 of the likely new owners of the 2,400-sq.-ft. standalone near the Menil Collection are Omar Afra and Jagatjit Katial of Free Press Houston and Fitzgerald’s fame. Inquiries for more information haven’t been returned.
- Is the Free Press Crew Opening a Bar in Montrose? [Eater Houston]
- A new bar with major music cred is opening by The Menil: Want to drink to Free Press? [Culturemap]
- Previously on Swamplot: West Main Standalone Now Available for Next Restaurant, “Dude, What Gives?â€: Cafe Artiste’s Disappearing Act
Photos: Allyn West
Fitzgeralds is terrible now. I think idiots in Houston like torturing themselves to go to a music festival in the middle of summer to listen to a bunch of random bands that are all un original and trying to hard.
what all is the Afra contingent running these days anyways? is it just Mango’s and Fitz’s or are there any others?
as for bands being un-original and trying too hard, i wish we were lucky enough to have all bands start out on these positives. not sure what lazy and “original” bands you’re enjoying these day are, but there aren’t many worth listening to.
Oh Look, a page straight out of the “I’m too cool for mainstream stuff that lots of people like” book. FPSF was a blast last year and this year should be even better. Over 90,000 of your fellow Houstonians, “idiots” as you so eloquently referred to them, agree with me. Surely you could find at least one original band in the vast lineup, no? No big deal, the Free Press crew will keep bringing alternative viewpoints, live music, festivals and now apparently bars to our great city while you spend your time on the internet being irrelevant.
They sure sell out a lot of their shows, they must be attentive to what the people want to hear.
Mephistopheles, I’d burn my books for a beer.
You guys sound like my baby boomer parents: “these new bands are just terrible” yada yada…all I ever heard when I was a kid in the late 80’s
Faustian Bargain sounds like a place Stefan would recommend on Weekend Update.
They just haven’t made good music since Huey Lewis & the News broke up.
It’s official: nothing inside the Houston city limits can exist without at least one Swamplot commenter standing by to complain about it.
Since when did June 1-2 turn into the “middle of summer”. The truth is that the average temperature range on June 1st in Houston is 73-87 degrees. Perfect for an all day show IMO.
You kids just don’t know what music is these days. All I see nowadays is a bunch of shaggy haired miscreants banging on pots for Satan.
Huey Lewis was very closely affiliated with Satan, if you delve into his back catalog and album liner notes. That was a large part of the appeal.
I thought it was crazy to schedule an outdoor music festival in summer, too, and then I went one year and found myself surrounded by 10,000 girls in barely-there bikinis, and realized that an outdoor summer festival in Houston is, in fact, a stroke of genius. (And the heat wasn’t bad at all that year–the second Summerfest, I believe.)
I found the heat at Summerfest to be pretty enervating, but I’m not a 20-something kid anymore by several decades. But my grumpy heat-hating was tempered when I saw Willie Nelson at 79 up there playing a set. I figured, if he can handle the heat, so can I.