Restaurants

Urban Taco Domination

Also: Go Fish founder and chef have re-bonded

By Mark Stuertz 

Marcus Pineyro, the 20-something SMU grad who slicked up Mexico City street food with his Urban Taco taco lounge in Mockingbird Station last year, is expanding. First stop: DFW International Airport where he'll ply his street fare in Terminal C near gate 22 come April. Then Pineyro will level a low-rise office building at McKinney and Lemmon near Hook Line & Sinker to make way for a taqueria cum rooftop lounge/patio in August. Uptown Urban Taco will be fast-casual by day, full service nights and weekends. "It will be a contemporary approach to traditional Mexican food," Pineyro says. Is this guy the salsa-fied Tristan Simon?

Make up and kissing fish: After a not altogether amicable Go Fish split in early 2006, Go Fish founder Mike Hoque and former Fish/36 Degrees/Sage chef Chris Svalesen have re-bonded. "I know how to work with Chris now," admits Hoque, who founded American Limos & Transportation (now called ALT Worldwide) some eight years ago. "My problem is that I didn't know anything about restaurants [back then]." He should now. Hoque opened Dallas Fish Market downtown and the fast-casual Fish Express at Forest near Preston before that. And he'll need Svalesen to help him relocate Go Fish from Addison to Village on the Green near BLT Steak, adding 1,000 square feet and a full sushi bar when it opens in July. He's hired frontman Michel Boutemy de Guislain (Popolos, Riviera, Paris Vendome) to prime it. "This is going to be my signature place," he says. Hoque is mulling ambitious plans for Fish Express with additional units loaded for Frisco, Southlake, Las Colinas, Fort Worth, Plano and Uptown. He's also sniffing out locations in Chicago, New York and San Francisco and is in preliminary talks with an unnamed national restaurant company to blow out more than 40 units nationally...Restaurant publicist Jeffrey Yarbrough (Big Ink), who cut his restaurant teeth with the defunct Liberty Noodles, signed on with real estate developer Hillwood to bring local chefs and restaurateurs to Victory Park, which got drunk and hung-over on out-of-town glitterati soon after opening. Yarbrough says he has five solid deals on the table after shuffling through some 50 possibilities. He hopes to add eight local projects in all.