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Hot little beds
What Dallas needs is little hotels. Cute hospitality fashion hunks with bellboys in eel-skin caps and desk girls with fishnets reaching up to mid-thigh taking hip guests to their little boutique sleep slots with dripping black candles burning on the nightstand. Maybe we’ll get some. Word is, Brandt and Brady Wood (the Green Room, Gypsy Tea Room) are gunning to be the little hotel moguls of the Southwest. They are planning to plug a 150-room boutique hotel (with a restaurant and cafe) dubbed The Epic in Deep Ellum, and they’re rumored to be sniffing around the 118-room, circa-1920s Paramount Hotel on Houston Street (where Fish restaurant is located) currently owned by Great Lakes Hotel Group. It’s about time somebody shoved their schnoz in there long enough to get a good whiff of the possibilities. Brandt Wood was noncommittal. “No. That’s not a sure thing,” he says. “We love that property. But it’s going to take strong commitment and strong vision to make it work.” And some swag. They’d have to gut the building and rebuild it, and that would be on top of the rumored $3.1 million asking price. The Woods are also shopping in Deep Ellum and downtown for place to plug a brasserie they’re developing called Jeroboam (named after the oversize wine bottle), set to open before the end of 1999. If any of this comes off like the Green Room, downtown Dallas may begin shedding its urban ennui.
Mixed Hash
Dallas chef Jill Alcott (Blind Lemon and Art Bar & Cafe) will open Chefs Palate this August in the McKinney Avenue space that once housed the restaurant Enigma (now at Routh and Cedar Springs). “It’s going to be like a little Eatzi’s with takeout and major catering,” trumpets Alcott. “It’s going to be so lucrative because there are so many offices and office towers here.” Count your lunch money…Hard to say what happened, but Soho Food, Drinks and Jazz chef Chris Finch (formerly of Chamberlain’s Prime Chop House) bolted from the Addison seafood spot. Owner Hamid Moallem says Finch failed to show up for work one day and Moallem tracked him down days later tackling “health” problems. “I don’t expect him back, but if he does come back, he’ll come to work here,” Moallem says. In the meantime, former Ocean Grill chef Mario Melgar has commandeered the kitchen.
–Mark Stuertz
E-mail Dish at markstz@flash.net.
