The Restaurant Gentrification of Lower Westheimer: A Long Time Coming
Houstonians have blissfully short memories. Blame it on our lack of investment in our city's history, as we constantly tear down and rebuild. Blame it on the petrochemicals. Blame it on Twitter. Regardless of the reason, we tend to forget things as soon as another shiny new toy comes along -- and the ongoing gentrification of Montrose and Lower Westheimer is no exception.
Photo illustration by Monica Fuentes This is Lower Westheimer in 1997. To see how it's grown year by year, click through our slideshow.
Ever since news of newcomers such as Uchi, Underbelly, Hay Merchant and El Real Tex-Mex was announced, Lower Westheimer has been spotlighted as a new "restaurant row" in Houston (and not just by CultureMap and the lovely Marene Gustin, who also writes for the Press). Only problem is, it's been a restaurant row for many years now.
And while some people may hail folks like Bobby Heugel and the Caswell-Floyd team as the harbingers of this new restaurant row, the truth is that -- as hardworking and talented as those men are -- it's restaurateurs like Mark Cox, Marco Wiles, Anita Jaisinghani, Tracy Vaught and Hugo Ortega who are really behind this "gentrification," which has been in the works for quite a long time.
Five years ago, when USA Today traveled to Houston and spotlighted our city as "a haven for hip cuisine," it was Cox and Wiles's restaurants that were given main mention -- the first two to come to this stretch of Westheimer. In fact, three of the six restaurants noted by the paper were on Lower Westheimer: Mark's American Cuisine, Da Marco and Indika.
Photo by Jeff Balke You'd never know the elegant interior of Mark's used to hold Houston's equivalent of Hot Topic...
"My whole idea was to open my own place," said Wiles one afternoon over sweaty glasses of water in the butter-colored dining room of his flagship restaurant, Da Marco. Like Cox, he's a veteran of the Vallone empire of restaurants, an executive chef who dreamed of slicing off his own piece of the pie. " I wanted to open an Italian restaurant that would succeed in Italy."
That restaurant, Da Marco, opened in early 2000, taking the place of Awash, an Ethiopian restaurant that had never seen quite enough traffic at its odd, triangular location on Westheimer and Ridgewood. The last time the spot had seen a high-end restaurant was when it was the intentionally bizarre Los Troncos back in the swinging 1960s, serving an odd menu of beef stroganoff, chicken curry and huachinango a la Veracruzana.
Two years prior, Mark's had opened just down the street, more or less kicking off the gentrification as we now know it. The upscale Mark's was doing incredibly well at the gates of Montrose, housed in a renovated 1920s-era church that had previously held a head shop and a goth/punk clothing store called Dream Merchant.
Photo by Kent Wang Da Marco's chalkboard lists its daily specials as you enter.
Yet Wiles knew he faced long odds in getting Da Marco to succeed as well. The few upscale restaurants in Montrose at this point were mostly vestiges of the Manfred Jachmich-dominated,1970s-era Continental dining days past, places like SoVino and Ruggles. And the days of people cruising Westheimer on the weekends, packed like a party from Dunlavy down to Elgin, were mostly over by the early 1990s.
"It had to be small enough," he said. "The rent had to be low enough to survive." Wiles quickly went on to win endless accolades for Da Marco's keenly authentic Italian food and service (many of those from the Houston Press).
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