Blondie

So Consolidated Restaurant Operations Chairman Gene Street, who has confessed to a fetish for what he calls the Dallas blond mystique, has inked a deal to fill the former Star Canyon space in the Centrum with a Silver Fox Steakhouse in January. Or rather, operations partner Mark Loebs has. Loebs, who once managed the La Bare male strip club before scaling the ranks at El Chico, Cantina Laredo, III Forks and the original Silver Fox Steakhouse in Grapevine, has teamed up with Street and Peyton Thomas Homes developer Tommy Dreiling to franchise the Silver Fox from Consolidated, which developed the concept along with III Forks founder Dale Wamstad. Meanwhile, Street says a group of a dozen or so Consolidated denizens plan to franchise another Silver Fox at Legacy Drive and Highway 121. It's under construction. This will bring the number of Dallas-Fort Worth Silver Foxes to five, including the Richardson location that Wamstad franchises from Consolidated. "It's a little bit discombobulated," admits Street. "You know? Who owns what and who's whose boss?" Street says he's also knee-deep in the process of turning a new leaf, swearing off bad food and drink and thinking of giving his barber the sweats by going blond. "You'll see a new Street on or about November 15," he promises. "But I'm not getting a tit job or a gender change or anything like that."

---

Beyond the Box and Amuse founder Doug Brown has signed an agreement to develop and manage the food and beverage operations for the Belmont Hotel in Oak Cliff. Brown will craft the Belmont's bar and room service menus as well as design the cuisine offerings for an as-yet-unnamed restaurant that Brown describes as a contemporary take on retro diners. Opened in 1946 as The Belmont Motor Hotel, the Belmont was one of the first hotels to offer year-round air conditioning. Now it adds year-round wi-fi to that air conditioning... The Oceanaire Seafood Room has tapped Chad Kelley as its new executive chef. A sous chef at the Oceanaire's Indianapolis unit, Kelley replaces chef Marc Morton, who cooked his way to a Rising Star Chef Award during his four-year Oceanaire duty. Morton has moved on to take a civilized 9-to-5 executive chef post at the Central Market in Plano, taking over for Matthew Dunn, who left Central Market to be executive chef at Stephan Pyles restaurant last year. Meanwhile, Chris Pyun, one-time executive chef at the recently locked and soon-to-be liquidated Jeroboam and opening chef for the shuttered/soon-to-be-liquidated Green Room, is back in Dallas filling the executive chef opening at the Dallas Central Market. Pyun left Jeroboam last September to mount the executive chef post at Hi Life Kitchen & Cocktails, a restaurant he founded in Atlanta in 1997.