Headline in the HouChron:
Miss that Monte Cristo? You’re in luck.
Well, actually, I don’t miss that Monte Cristo, because there’s a food trailer on South Congress that makes a better one than Bennigan’s ever did. (I can’t find it online, but it is located in the same lot as Crepes Mille, which does an awesome panang curry crepe.)
Anyway, the gist of the HouChron‘s piece is that certain well-known brands are coming back to the city:
- There’s a new Bennigan’s at Westheimer and Dunvale.
- There’s a Del Taco somewhere on Westheimer, and the owner has plans to open “40 more”. I haven’t been to a Del Taco in years; there was one near my house in the early 1980s.
- Steak ‘n Shake is expanding, and gets their own separate article. I’m sure Roger Ebert is delighted, but as a food critic, he should stick to reviewing movies.
- “Shoney’s On the Go, a counter-service version of a traditional Shoney’s restaurant, is open at 12350 Westheimer.” I think we ate at Shoney’s a few times on family vacations (or am I confusing Shoney’s and Big Boy?), but I never really caught the bug. (Huh. It looks like there’s an actual Shoney’s near San Antonio, but the nearest Big Boy is 1,052 miles away according to Google.)
- Totally unrelated to food, but Gulf Oil is making a comeback as well. There’s one fairly near my apartment, and they have decent prices. But that particular station has rebranded itself so many times (mostly just generic gas, though they were a BP station until the great oil spill, at which point they dropped that like a hot potato) that I don’t trust them.
If a retail chain left Houston, it wasn’t necessarily because consumers didn’t like the brand. The city may have been going through an economic slump, or perhaps the franchisee was a less-than-ideal operator or the locations were wrong, said Mark Siebert, CEO of Chicago-based iFranchise, a franchise consulting firm.
Thank you, Captain Obvious!