Honey for Barflies

Old breweries don't die, they just stay up late to feed barflies square meals. At least that's what's happening to the old Hoffbrau Steaks Brewery on Belt Line and Midway in Addison. It's been taken over by a couple of Houston investors who plan to call it Duke's Original Road House, a venue that's described by general manager Mark Collins as a "restaurant with a nightclub mentality." "The food is what's going to set us apart from a lot of these late-night restaurants," he adds. Duke's will have everything from steaks and seafood to Mexican food, and it will serve that grub nightly until 2 a.m.

Collins says the new Addison venture is a partnership between Houston operators Jeff Meinecke (Club Blue Planet) and Ken Wales (Sam's Boat and Joe's Crab Shack). He promises Duke's should be open by April Fools' Day. "We're just going balls to the wall right now."

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Consolidated Restaurants Cos. chief Gene Street says his company is scouring the northern environs (Tollway, Plano, Frisco) for a home for another Dallas-area Cool River Café. He says they're also sniffing out Dallas and Fort Worth locations for Silver Fox, the steakhouse his company created with III Forks founder Dale Wamstad. "Seems like there needs to be more steakhouses," Street quips.

But the real momentum in Street's career isn't in restaurants. It's in music. In a recent III Forks radio commercial with III Forks manager Rick Stein, Street not only unveils his singing ability. He test-drives his piercing falsetto through an a cappella version of "Tiptoe Through the Tulips," which he dedicates to Wamstad.

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Entrepreneur Joy Harris says she's worked hard to break free from the traditional ice cream parlor temperament. "When I think ice cream store, I think of old guys in white aprons and the whole twisty-turny barber shop signs," she says. She's crafted a sleek modernistic shop in colors you normally don't see outside of golf courses and fanny packs (fuchsia, lime green, neon orange).

She calls her shop in Coppell Frost Bites, and it serves Italian ice, soft-serve custard, ice cream and shakes. Harris, 24, has also employed an unusual design cue. She's taken the doors from junked refrigerators, painted them in those same fanny-pack hues and bolted them to the wall. She provides customers with paper and pens so that they can post notes and pictures on those doors with refrigerator magnets. Isn't the interior-design community trying to crack down on this sort of eyesore?