Staked

Just like that, the steak and the sizzle have been plucked off McKinney Avenue. Angelo & Maxie's Steakhouse, a Manhattan-based red-beef meat market roping 24- to 35-year-olds with the ploy that you're "never 2 hip" to tuck into a 24-ounce T-bone, has canceled plans to go into Chateau Plaza in the former San Simeon space, the spot where former Fish chef Chris Svalesen once contemplated putting in a seafood venture called Copper River. Angelo & Maxie's was launched in 1996 in Manhattan's Flatiron District as a steakhouse with an energetic bar scene. A few years later, it was scooped up by Chicago-based Chart House Enterprises Inc., which had plans to spread the restaurant's "larger-than-life steakhouse menu and art deco décor" to several cities in the West and Southwest. In Dallas at least, it's now all meatloaf.

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They've been provisioning Dallas for almost half a century. Now Wall's Cateringhas recovered a Cowboys fumble. This past October, Wall's owner Kyle Wall purchased Yvette, the Addison continental restaurant and cabaret that opened in 1996 with the involvement of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and former coach Barry Switzer. The restaurant had shut down in July before Wall picked it up October 1. Plans call for the company to retain Yvette's opulent interior and transform it into a banquet facility called Abbotsford Court shortly after the first of the year...So what made the Flying Burro crash? Maybe it was segment sluggishness. Maybe it was golf. But owner Scott Cain insists it was soul searching. "It was time to move on," he says. "I got a good offer, and I just decided that maybe I should look at doing something else." That good offer came from Charles McGinness, owner of Dodie's seafood, who purchased the Burro and plans to turn it into a venue serving grilled seafood, according to Cain (McGinness could not be reached for comment). Cain, who says he has been questioning his life for the past year, still doesn't know what he is going to do. But he seems to know what he isn't going to do, adding that the chances of his re-entering the restaurant business are roughly 15 percent, if that. "It's hard to really put it into words," he says. "It's just I think I may be better off doing something else."...Rooster sous chef Jorge Cruz is filling the slot of executive chef vacated by Billy Webb, who tossed his toque to fill a position at the Hilton at Preston Center...Nana Grill, the restaurant way up in the Wyndham Anatole Hotel, has a new chef to fill the spot of hyper-lauded chef Doug Brown, the young spatula jock who took off for California several months ago. Nana signed David McMillan, who's vacating his post as chef and partner at a Los Angeles catering company known for kowtowing to Hollywood stars, to take over in mid-January.