Southern Discomfort for Screen Door

Chef Joel Harloff is gone from Screen Door. That's put an opening drag on Scott Jones' (founder of Café Italia with a new location in Oak Cliff's Bishop Arts) new Southern cuisine concept in One Arts Plaza. Instead of opening early in the New Year, Screen Door will now open sometime in April. But what's up with the chef departure? Harloff says he and Jones parted amicably. Jones agrees. Sort of. "It was a concept thing," Jones says. "He wasn't completely grasping it in terms of the Southern style...That's just not his bag." So Harloff, former Melrose executive chef, is consulting with Londoner founder Barry Tate as the pair prepares to expand The Londoner (from Addison and McKinney) in the State Thomas Historic District sometime...soon.

Former Coca-Cola marketing guru Brian Twomey quietly opened his Loft 610 kitchen and lounge at the southeast corner of Highway 121 and the Tollway over the holidays. (Motto: Think Uptown. Way, way Uptown.) "We just wanted to slowly open," says general manager Mike Paradise III. "So the first night we had six tables, the next night we had 10, the next night we had 14." In the kitchen is Brinker and P.F. Chang's alum Craig Latshaw plus chef de cuisine Marcos Rodriguez. On the plate are tenderloin meatloaf sliders, Shiner-Melbec hanger steak and calamari "corn dogs." In the dining room is? "Our whole vibe is that when you walk into the building you feel like you've walked into the warehouse district in New York with this building that's 100 years old, and it was a warehouse and we renovated it and turned it into a really hip new restaurant," says Paradise in one breath. But the building never was a warehouse. It never was 100 years old. It's brand new. In Plano. Plus, didn't the old warehouse school of restaurateuring die out in Deep Ellum last century?...After seven months of wrangling with the city of Colleyville and assorted insurance companies, chef David McMillan says the wood-burning oven in his kitchen at 62 Main has been relit. A duct fire snuffed it last May. "There wasn't too much damage except the fire department came in and dug lots of exploratory holes," he says. McMillan says the dormant oven took a lot of cachet out of the dining room. And a lot cabbage from his bottom line.