This is curious: Thomas Gilliland, co-founder of Fonda San Miguel in Austin, dispersed a thinly veiled "cease and desist" letter to Texas media and various culinary luminaries (Stephan Pyles and Rick Bayless, among others) lamenting the pending opening of Ron Guest's Café San Miguel, named after the Mexican city. "My strong feeling is that there will be confusion between Fonda SAN MIGUEL in Austin and Casa [sic] SAN MIGUEL in Dallas," Gilliland writes. "I would like you to consider renaming your new restaurant to avoid this confusion." Guest, who hasn't seen the letter because it was mailed to Café La Duni instead of Café San Miguel, was befuddled. "How do you copyright San Miguel?" he asks. Though Guest's partner Jesús Carmona has since left the restaurant, he's hired a chef: Café Pacific alumnus Fernando Marrufo...Last week, The Dallas Morning News reported that chef Marc Haines (North-South, Sipango) had joined Keith Black's (Blue, Lime) Che, the massive nightclub and restaurant set to open on Technology Boulevard. Not so, Haines says. He says he merely assembled a menu and hired the kitchen staff, a part of his job as a representative for Sysco Foodservices. Haines says the report, apparently based on a Che press release trumpeting his arrival, raised the ire of his Sysco bosses. "It was not a fun day," he says... Hamburger Mary's, the small San Francisco-based burger chain that slipped a franchised unit onto Lemmon Avenue in early 2004 in the former 36 Degrees location, has closed.
