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  • 3 weeks later...

They started taking down the crane at the Hanover tower yesterday. Sorry for the hazy picture, it was right after the rain had stopped.

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It's only a matter of time before the east side of Pist Oak has towers as well

 

 As someone who lives on the east side of Post Oak and who's view would be seriously blocked by one, I really hope it's a LONG time. ;)

Edited by Golyadkin
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Wasn't able to take a pic, but True Food Kitchen on the north side of the building seriously looks ready to open any time now...signs up, furniture in and lots of activity...

Edited by gene
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EEEEEEEKKKKKK!!!!  GHOSTS!!!!!!  It's not even finished and it's already haunted!!!

 

I know!  He looks like one of the ghosts from the "I see dead people" movie ... the one in which the ghosts don't know they are dead and continue their daily activities!

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

True Food Kitchen in the new BLVD Place opens July 29th...they have a job fair going on now! Also while i dont have a photo, they put the "Whole Foods Market" large letters/signage up in front of the building/on top of the entrance...really cant wait to have this open just a block north west of my office and a block south east of my apartment!

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In December they will open a similar concept called Peska in BLVD Place in the Galleria/Uptown area.

When customers walk in to the upscale Peska, they will see a 16-foot-long ice case displaying fresh fish from around the world. A "seafood sommelier" will take them to the display and guide them through the market catches of the day, helping them pick fish for their meal.

The fresh fish on ice, unusual for an upscale Houston eatery, gives Peska what the restaurant world calls a point of difference.

"Within the last few years we've seen the Houston restaurant scene become transformed," Diego Ysita said, and in a city where dining standards are high, it helps to offer something a little different.

Emily Durham, president of Houston-based Restaurant Connections, a market consulting and real estate brokerage firm, agreed that a one-of-a-kind restaurant can have an advantage in Houston's highly competitive restaurant environment.

Ideally, she said, a new-to-market concept should be easy for the public to understand.

If it's so different that it needs explanation, it can be a challenge. For example, she said, restaurant customers had to be educated when tapas first came to Houston.

Sometimes an out-of-the-ordinary restaurant does best in a particular neighborhood, she said. For example, Underbelly is on Lower Westheimer in Montrose, home to a number of cutting-edge restaurants.

Underbelly - a farm-and-ranch-to-table restaurant with a butcher, in-house curing and more cuts of meats than most restaurants - might not thrive in every area, she said. Nothing may ever be completely new under the sun, of course, including Peska's fish display on ice.

For example, J&J Seafood in southwest Houston also has a fish market and kitchen, but it is more basic, and mostly a to-go operation.

Chris Tripoli, president of A'La Carte Foodservice Consulting Group, who helped tweak the Peska concept and provided operations assistance, had to venture outside Texas to find another high-end seafood market/restaurant and found one in Las Vegas, he said.

Peska will be more international than the La Traineras in Mexico, Tripoli said, and the menu will include Mediterranean, European and Latin American flavors. Fish will be flown in from places as distant as Italy, Spain or Alaska and as close as the Gulf of Mexico. Customers also will be able to order off the menu and to buy whole fish by the pound to go.

The 6,000-square-foot restaurant will be at the corner of San Felipe and Post Oak Lane in Phase 2 of BLVD Place, and have a bar and patio.

The Uptown/Galleria area has become a restaurant hub, said Ed Wulfe, chairman and CEO of Wulfe & Co., developer of BLVD Place.

"Restaurants bring energy to a retail center," he said.

Phase 1 of BLVD Place has two - RDG & Bar Annie and Table on Post Oak.

Phase 2, under construction, will have five restaurants, and Wulfe said Peska is among three that have been announced. The others are True Food Kitchen, opening at the end of July, and North, opening in late fall. Whole Foods Market also will open a grocery there in early fall.

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/retail/article/Restaurant-hopes-to-hook-customers-with-5632132.php#/4

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  • 2 weeks later...

nice picture. is anyone else a little put off by the plain vanilla podium parking garages on buildings such as randall davis' cosmopolitan?  i realize that this is the norm, but i do see developers and architects going for a little less profit in exchange for good design, on occasion.  too bad davis isn't of the latter sort. his faux facades are a guilty pleasure of mine, i wish he would be all in or not at all.  it ruins the building for me; i wouldn't consider living in that building because i would hate parking in the ugly box my condo was resting on.  it would piss me off each time i came home.  does that make me shallow or just refined?  i guess the ugly box will be mostly unnoticed after all of the additional buildings are up; plant some pine trees or giant bamboo around that thing please.

 

with my rant out of the way; back to reality, we can expect more downsized or diminished designs with construction costs through the roof.  i think that the building industry is having difficulty getting things built on time, labor shortages, material availability,etc.  as long as constructions costs are high, design and flash will take a back seat. sad but true.

 

houston's transition to higher density is truly fascinating.  it would be interesting to see if there is photo documentation of the transition of manhattan island from single dwellings, to multi-storied buildings, to high and mid-rise.  the higher density transition taking place in and around the loop is a rapid cultural shift that may be quite significant historically.  houstonians will be a different breed altogether in 10-15 years.  it's amazing and fantastic....and we are documenting it here on haif.  haif will be a boon to anyone wanting to research houston's boom in the 2010s.  uptown is but one focal point of houston's rapidly changing city-scape.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I went to True Food Kitchen for brunch Sunday (really great place) and explored the BLVD Place building a bit. Holy cow they still have a lot of work to do, both on the Whole Foods and all the other surrounding stores. The enclosed area to the far left (as looking straight at the building from Post Oak; where the proposed Verizon is to go) still has dirt floors on the first level. I have no idea why they're taking so incredibly long to finish this place up, Wolfe is really dropping the ball.

Edited by richfish
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  • The title was changed to Is Whole Foods Coming To Boulevard Place?
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