Noodling Around

Jeffrey Yarbrough(founder of Club Clearview and the new Deep Ellum club Open), the visionary entrepreneur who was first to tease Dallas with the noodle-house trend that never got traction, is set to open a bigger Dallas copy of Liberty Noodles, the pan-Asian noodle residence he opened in late 1997 off Lower Greenville. This is a good thing. Set to open in October, the new 4,700-square-foot Liberty at The Pavilion on Lovers Lane should be much easier to squeeze into than the 2,000-square-foot or so version off Greenville (a big plus when you're suffering from noodle bloat). And, like its older sibling, the new Liberty "will boast a whimsically chic environment with playful Asian touches." Hard to know what that means, but the Lovers Liberty will "boast" the restaurant's first children's menu.

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Dallas Texadelphia founder Tom Landis says his company has sold its Fort Worth installment to its Denton franchisee. "It's part of the plan to build up franchisees by allowing them to buy existing stores rather than enter the restaurant business through city hall's red-tape hell called the 'permitting process,'" Landis says. He adds that he's sublet the Deep Ellum Texadelphia to Trae Doss, a manager of the original Dallas Texadelphia off McKinney Avenue (which was scraped from the earth to make room for Hotel ZaZa), who will open Tex's Taphouse (15 beers on tap) in the back bar of the restaurant. The bar's stage features a papier-mâché horse's ass, no doubt made from city permit forms...Jason Hice, a Big Apple import who did stints at Daniel, Lutéce and Bouley, has been named executive sous chef at Nana...Urbano Paninoteca, the Italian sandwich bar opened by Mitch and Kristen Kauffman off McKinney Avenue on Fairmount, has stretched out its breakfast and lunch service to include dinner that can now be washed down with bottled beer or wine...It's not clear what psychic impact Voltaire's closure late last month will have on the restaurant's founding chef George Papadopoulos. But, having concluded his stint as a consulting chef for Mico Rodriguez's 13 Mi Cocina restaurants, Papadopoulos is wandering the nation, looking for a kitchen to park his spatula. "I got a couple of things I'm mulling over," he says. "I could go anywhere. Everything is up in the air, just like my life."...In the 17th century, French monks were barred from sipping chocolate on account of its aphrodisiac properties. No monastery, Umlaut, the downtown subterranean lounge launched by the founders of the Green Room, recently inaugurated a "Chocolaut" menu with chocolate cocktails, chocolate shots and assorted chocolates and truffles. The decent thing to do would be to offer chocolate rosaries, too.