By Jonathan Smith

jsmith@currentargus @CCAJonSmith on Twitter

Jon Smith -- Current-Argus Building shows the progress of McAlister's Deli at the Carlsbad Mall. Local officials say the restaurant is scheduled to open its doors in May.

CARLSBAD >> Construction on three new hotels and a popular deli are still on track for openings this year in Carlsbad, according to local officials.

McAlister's Deli, a national restaurant chain, should open its doors first good news for local residents who are craving the chain's sandwiches and sweet tea. The restaurant is currently set to open some time in May, said John Waters, director of the Carlsbad Department of Development.

"As far as we've been told and from what we've seen, everything is still on schedule for a May opening," Waters said. "We are really excited about that."

The deli is not the only buzz going around town for construction. Three new hotels are in the first stages of construction. All three hotels are scheduled to be open before the holiday season later in the year, Waters said.

Jon Smith -- Current-Argus Signs for McAlister's Deli lie the Carlsbad Mall for the restaurant chain. Local officials say the restaurant is scheduled to open its doors in May.

The hotels include La Quinta, Comfort Suites and Marriott Suites.

Marriott Suites, located at the old Furr's restaurant site, was the last new hotel to be announced and start construction. According to county records, the property, which is now split into two lots, was sold in June 2013.

Link:
New restaurants, hotels on track to open in Carlsbad in 2014

A massive warehouse that for 70 years has perched at Duke Street on the Alexandria waterfront would be replaced with high-end residences, retail and a restaurant with views of the Potomac River, according to plans presented to the citys Waterfront Commission on Tuesday.

Robert D. Youngentob, a principal in the development company EYA, outlined the firms concept for an approximately $200million project that he said will transform the 3.5-acre site from industrial to a modern residential-commercial mix.

The presentation was the first public glimpse of what would replace the building known as Robinson Terminal South, which Graham Holdings the former owner of The Washington Post agreed to sell to EYA last year.

In addition to about 100 condominium units and townhouses, the project includes a public promenade and an upgraded pier that would allow boats and yachts to tie up for daytime visits. It is a key part of the Alexandria waterfront plan, which was the subject of a pitched two-year battle over the eight blocks of Old Town that border the Potomac. Opponents objected to the traffic and congestion that more development could bring.

We know there is a lot of controversy and history with the citys waterfront plan, and we want to balance, not overwhelm, the area, Youngentob said in an interview.

Lawsuits by opponents have failed to stop the waterfront plan, twice endorsed by the Alexandria City Council. It allows two boutique hotels, new residences and expanded parks along the river. Traffic, landscape design and flood mitigation studies are underway.

The Waterfront Commission, an advisory group appointed by the City Council, received the proposal with little discussion early Tuesday at its meeting.

People were in general pretty pleased, said council member Paul Smedberg (D), who serves on the commission. There were some questions about environmental issues, the piers, how people would get in and out.

The next significant step will be when the developers turn the concept into an actual plan. EYA officials said they expect to stay within the citys 50-foot height limit for the site, with condominium buildings of four or five stories.

The land will be raised, an effort to prevent flooding. The waterfront street, called the Strand, will be extended through the old warehouse property, then connected with Union Street.

Link:
Developer proposing upscale housing, restaurant on Alexandria warehouse site

In a far corner of campus in the Mateer Building, students bustle around for their first-ever restaurant management position at Caf Laura.

Caf Laura, open for lunch and dinner, is an educational opportunity for students to manage every aspect of running a restaurant in preparation for jobs outside of the classroom, restaurant manager Scott King said.

The student-run restaurant is planning for reconstruction that will begin May 1, the first time since 1998, King said.

The restaurant is almost entirely run by students, and it is used as a tool to prepare students for management positions after they graduate, King said. In order to better prepare students, the restaurant has to keep up with industry trends, such as environmental awareness.

The renovations will allow students to practice these industry trends, and they will even try to stay ahead of trends in the restaurant industry with new technologies, lead instructor George Ruth said.

Some of the new technologies include registers that will help the dining experience run more smoothly, he said.

With the renovations, teaching assistant Carly Szyszko said she thinks the restaurant can be more functional.

During lunch time, thats just a mess in there, Szyszko said.

But during the operating hours, students learn valuable lessons about managing a restaurant, King said.

Since the restaurant works with campus food services, students have the pressure of making sure everything finances, customer service, food quality works well.

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Student-run caf plans construction

Public Kitchen and Bar is expected to open this summer along Sixth Street in Lowertown St. Paul. (Facebook photo)

The space between Barrio and Bin Wine Bar in Lowertown St. Paul will be home to another restaurant early this summer.

Owner Carol March says Public Kitchen and Bar will serve American food with two full bars, one upstairs and one down.

March, a real estate broker, said she's never really left the restaurant business since working in one as a teen, and she's always had dreams of opening her own place.

She couldn't resist the opportunity to open a restaurant in the historic building on Sixth Street.

"I'm from St. Paul originally," March said. "I love history, and I love old buildings. I'm really excited to open my own restaurant in my hometown."

March has already ripped down the awnings that were blocking much of the natural light -- and the view of Mears Park. Interior construction will begin soon.

The inside will retain the integrity of the "historically significant" building, March said.

She just hired a chef, but she's not ready to say who it is just yet. The menu should appeal to nearby businesspeople and condo-dwellers alike. Lunch, served upstairs only, and dinner are planned.

March is hoping for an early-summer opening.

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Lowertown: New restaurant opening across from Mears Park

The James Beard Foundation announces finalists for its annual culinary awards Tuesday at The Publican, but five restaurant operators already know they are winners.

The foundation's America's Classics honor favors destinations across the country that involve more cooks than chefs, diners than bistros and ethnic than eclectic cuisine.

If this were the Oscars, the honor would be a lifetime achievement award for character actors whose long and steady careers avoid split personalities and outlandish costume changes. The Midwest is well represented in this elite group, which tends to favor blue-collar sensibilities and decor that is vintage.

Consider these past Chicago winners: Calumet Fisheries in 2010, Tufano's Vernon Park Tap in 2008 and The Berghoff in 1999.

Now another Midwestern restaurant takes its place among the Classics winners (see sidebar). Sokolowski's University Inn in Cleveland is a cafeteria-style restaurant that began as a tavern in 1923 and started serving Salisbury steak to bridge construction workers in the 1950s. That entree and Polish foods pierogi, kielbasa, stuffed cabbage rolls still are served and recipes are shared online.

"We've seen the neighborhood change and the city change," said co-owner Mike Sokolowski of the third-generation business. What began as an ethnic mix of Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Greeks and Slovakians as neighbors today is "more artsy, kind of yuppie," yet full of the same customer devotion, he added.

"A lot of people have been good to us," Sokolowski said, and it doesn't seem to matter that the business sticks with cafeteria-style service. "We're a dinosaur in that regard. If I had to do it again, I'd do it again."

Sokolowski's University Inn is at 1201 University Road in Cleveland, 216-771-9236; sokolowskis.com.

Earning a Classics award doesn't guarantee an easy future, however. The Berghoff closed in 2006 then reopened. The same happened at Pickwick Restaurant & Pub in Duluth, Minn., an America's Classics winner in 2007 and sold by the founding Wisocki family in 2010.

The Pickwick began serving simple grub as a beer brewer's pub 100 years ago. Now it is known for char-grilled steaks, seafood and pastas. The setting shows off locally crafted, ornate woodwork and murals of brewing and immigrant life.

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Beard foundation names new culinary classics in the Midwest

The Howard Hughes Corporation (NYSE: HHC) and its wholly owned subsidiary, The Woodlands Development Company, announced that HUSA Management Inc. signed on to open Local Pour at Restaurant Row in Hughes Landing on Lake Woodlands. Construction is set to begin this summer, with opening scheduled for late this year.

Local Pour is the second restaurant to announce plans to locate in Hughes Landing, a 66-acre mixed-use development that will include up to 11 Class A office buildings, shopping, a selection of up to 12 restaurants at Restaurant Row, entertainment, a Whole Foods Market, an upscale hotel, fitness center and up to 800 multifamily residences. Escalantes Fine Tex-Mex & Tequila also has announced plans to begin construction soon at Restaurant Row, with opening set for late this year.

Local Pour features a chef-driven menu of American favorites and a large selection of craft beer on tap. This will be its second location in the Houston area.

Restaurant Row will be a major attraction for the employees, residents and visitors to Hughes Landing on Lake Woodlands, said Paul Layne, executive vice president of Master Planned Communities for The Howard Hughes Corporation. Having a variety of lakeside dining options available within walking distance to office buildings, residences, shopping and entertainment distinguishes Hughes Landing from the competition.

HUSA Management Inc. is pleased to announce the expansion of the Local Pour concept in The Woodlands, said Heather Suggitt, director of Marketing. Based on the success of its first location in River Oaks and the current development in The Woodlands area, we believe that this area will become one of the top growth markets in the Southwest not just for restaurants, but all segments of the economy. Our scratch kitchen and focus on providing the consumer with Texas options for beer, wine and spirits will cater to the current consumer trends in restaurant growth.

HUSA Management Inc. was represented by Debbie Adams, of Edge Realty. Rip Reynolds, director of Leasing, represented The Howard Hughes Corporation.

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Local Pour coming to Hughes Landing

As much as gastronauts cherish their visits to the avant-garde Spanish restaurants Mugaritz, Berasategui and Arzak, many of them will confess that their last trips to San Sebastian may have been less about 14-course meals of high-modern cuisine than cider-fueled wanderings through the old town, where Txakoli flows and the succession of tapas bars is unmatched anywhere in Spain. And while these travelers can tell you in detail about the fuming tide pools of seafood they were served at Azurmendi or the edible river stones at Mugaritz, their fondest memories may be of the kitschy San Sebastian pintxos bar A Fuego Negro, which exists almost as a modernist joke on the excesses of modernism. At A Fuego Negro, you can snack on sous-vide pigeon breast with beet-juice "blood" and edible buckshot, ham coffee with sweetbread cookies, and pickled pig's ears with Oaxacan mole ice cream. Hyper-intellectual cuisine has its place, but parody can be more fun.

So in a Los Angeles restaurant scene dominated at the moment by extreme localism, modernist trickery and the marriage of European and Asian technique, Scratch Bar, a sleek, dim gastropub next to Matsuhisa on La Cienega's restaurant row, is a welcome bit of comic relief, the wiseguy telling jokes in the corner while the popular kids forage miner's lettuce and make buttermilk cheese with a centrifuge.

At Scratch Bar, chef Phillip Frankland Lee and his band roast half-cylinders of sourdough bread, scoop out grooves in the center and fill them with bone marrow trompe l'oeil marrow bones, garnished with ruddy bits of beet-marinated vegetables. They bake whole smelt inside crackers, so that the little fish appear to be emerging from the flat surface like nudes in a Robert Graham sculpture, and set them upright in blood-red smears of beet and beef marrow.

They construct canaps of sweetbreads, tiny flatbread and maple vinegar, call them "Chicken" 'n' Waffle, and dare you to eat them in a single bite. You do, and the sensation is straight out of a Sunday morning at Roscoe's. They inject green olives with pured Kalamatas, dip them in batter, deep-fry them and drizzle them with a little honey. If you have ever wondered what olives might taste like if they were stuffed with other olives instead of pimientos, this is your chance.

When you order Smoking Goat's Milk Cheese, the dry, crumbly fresh cheese comes to the table under a kind of upside-down glass terrine, where it has been resting next to a small pile of smoldering dried timothy grass. ("The same hay the goats eat," confides the waiter.) The top of the glass is smeared with pured olives, which you are encouraged to spread on little rounds of toast. The ruddy pickled vegetables show up again. The waiter replaces the terrine over the sputtering haystack. You watch the vessel slowly fill up again with smoke. The cheese may be dryish, and the smoke makes it smell a bit as if it had been hanging out with the Marlboro Man, but the rugged flavors seem to work.

The signature presentation is probably Squid in a Box the box is fashioned from fried potato, and the construction rests on a tar-black pure of charred eggplant, but it is indeed squid in a box. Vegetarians can have a Box Full of Vegetables instead.

Sometimes the restaurant's effects are elaborate, like the snack of skewered mussels suspended over a shot of sake, which in turn conceals a few grams of sea urchin paved with avocado mousse: Eat, sip, eat. Sometimes, as with the roasted corn rolled in toasted bread crumbs, the point is simple. The squishiness of long-braised pork belly rhymes nicely with the squishiness of a raw Kumamoto oyster. It's a nice bite. But the squishiness of long-braised pork belly does nothing for the briny creaminess of uni in an abstracted version of chirashi sushi. That experiment doesn't work. The corn-infused custard spiked with king crab meat doesn't really work either, at least until sweet corn comes back into its peak season, but you can see the reason behind it.

This is probably the place to point out that, while Scratch Bar is set up like a cocktail bar and, in fact, features cocktails designed by Dave Fernie of Pour Vous, the restaurant has only a wine and beer license, and those fancy drinks are made with sake, sherry or soju instead of booze. In practice, this works out. The Bangkok Dangerous, made with pineapple, two sakes and a dusting of cayenne, would not have been out of place at the Tiki Ti.

I'm not sure Lee is aiming toward a higher end at Scratch Bar, but in a way it doesn't matter. His food tastes pretty good, it is attractively presented and it makes you smile. I suspect the tiny portions and militant whimsy might enrage a certain kind of customer, but for the most part this, and the vanilla ice cream cones with house-made jimmies, may be enough.

Scratch Bar

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Jonathan Gold | L.A. restaurant review: Scratch Bar is comic relief

Filipino restaurant is also a community space in the heart of the city

Owner helps elderly and nonprofits in the area

Mama Tess Diaz-Guzman takes a break at her JT Restaurant. (PHOTO BY PAUL DUNN/CENTRAL CITY EXTRA) Click to see the full Special Report, Old and Poor in Tech City.

SAN FRANCISCO, California Someone who doesnt live or work in the area around 6th and Mission might walk past the Mint Mall and miss the tiny JT Restaurant. But around the neighborhood there are many, from elderly residents to construction workers to Filipino and Latino families, who know the business not only for its home-style chicken and pork adobo, but also for its vital role as a community space.

At the center of it all is the owner and chef, Tess Diaz-Guzman, who is called Mama Tess by those who know her.

Im proud because everybody calls me [that], she says, laughing. I have a lot of nephews and nieces, but [many are] American.

Diaz-Guzman, 55, owns JT Restaurant in the South of Market neighborhood in San Franciscos central city area, with her husband Juan, whom she married in 2010. Formerly a butcher and originally from the province of Laguna in the Philippines, she came to San Francisco 13 years ago, shortly after her first husband passed away.

Her brother already lived in San Francisco and had started the Filipino restaurant in the 1990s. Diaz-Guzman and Juan took charge of it a few years ago, renaming it JT Restaurant (the initials for Juan and Tess).

Business is community hub

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San Franciscos Mama Tess serves elderly a taste of home

Developer Rocco Termini won approval today for a downtown restaurant he plans to fashion out of eight to 10 metal shipping containers.

Dog Style, to be built close to the Catholic Health System headquarters now under construction, got a green light from the Planning Board to proceed. No Planning Board member commented on the eyebrow-raising name of the restaurant, though members were concerned about what color the restaurant would be.

The plan calls for the shipping containers to be stacked on top of each other, covering concrete, to create two floors. They come in three colors: blue, green and red, and one of the colors will be selected for the restaurant, Termini said.

Its something thats being done all over the country, Termini said of using the shipping containers.

Millions of the empty containers can be found in the United States, because it costs more to send them back to China than what they are worth, he said.

The 3,000-square-foot restaurant, planned for a narrow vacant lot at 128 Genesee St., between two buildings, would feature patios on two levels and specialize in hot dogs and beer.

Developer Fred LoFaso, who plans to buy an adjoining property and has it under contract, said he supports the project. But it would block a fire exit in his building, he said.

Termini called the existing fire exit illegal and said it lacks an easement. The board approved the restaurant plan and left it to the citys codes department to work out the fire exit issue.

The board also approved plans for Habibination, a hookah lounge in the former Ambrosia restaurant at 467 Elmwood Ave.

The lounge would not prepare food onsite and not serve alcohol, owner Amir Abbas told the board.

The rest is here:
Planning board approves Terminis restaurant made of shipping containers

Wednesday, March 12, 10:48 AM EDT

From Staff

A shell building was approved for construction at 15128 Max Leggett Parkway. The Angelo Group Inc. is the contractor for the 4,918-square-foot retail building at a project cost of $600,000. Plans show Moes Southwest Grill will take 2,600 square feet of the structure and another retail tenant will take the remaining space.

Pollo Operations Inc. buys Bartram site

Pollo Operations Inc. bought property in the Shoppes at Bartram Park from Compass Bank for $1.2 million. The deed was recorded Monday with the Duval County Clerk of Court.

Pollo Tropical is joining the growth at Bartram Park in Jacksonvilles Southside. The Miami-based chain, with three restaurants in Jacksonville, plans to build its fourth at 13776 Old St. Augustine Road in the Shoppes at Bartram Park.

A concurrency application showed the restaurant site was owned by Compass Bank.

Pollo Tropical Chicken on the Grill is part of Pollo Operations Inc. of Miami.

The city issued a permit for North Coast Construction Co. to build the 3,801-square-foot restaurant and drive-thru at at a project cost of $340,000.

The chain focuses on Caribbean-inspired, citrus-marinated grilled chicken. In addition to its signature grilled chicken, it offers slow-roasted mojo pork, salads, sandwiches and wraps.

Original post:
Food notes: Churchs Chicken, Moes Southwest Grill building in North Jacksonville