It looks like yet another food hall is set to make its Houston debut right near White Oak Music Hall in the coming months.
Leasing documents for the property indicate that it is a project of the minds behind Les Givral’s Kahve and Oui Banh Mi, and will be anchored by a new Vietnamese restaurant called Oui Eats. The food hall will occupy a massive, two-story space at 2645 North Main Street in Houston. Inside the hall, there’s ample seating, along with four additional stalls, including an outpost of Houston hot dog favorite Good Dog, and a bar/coffee shop called Double Trouble. The project has been rumored since at least 2017, when popular Houston real estate forum HAIF first sniffed out the plans.
Interestingly enough, it looks as if this new food hall could be home to the latest restaurant from disgraced Houston chef Bruce Molzan. Those leasing documents suggest that Oui Eats will house a sprawling, 5,833-square-foot restaurant on its second floor called the Lantern by Ruggles. Molzan hasn’t publicly announced the restaurant as of yet, but filings with the United States Patent and Trademark Office indicate that Molzan’s company Molzan Inc. still owns the trademark for the word “Ruggles.”
As Houstonians will likely remember, Molzan was indicted on two charges of indecency with a child in 2018, and is currently scheduled to head back to court on March 19 related to those charges. Before that, Molzan was issued more than 200 “Class C” misdemeanor citations related to a seafood smuggling scheme that brought more than 28,000 pounds of illegally caught fish into the city’s restaurants.
There’s also the issue of food hall over-saturation. The trend has taken off in recent years, but Houston is clearly over-eager to embrace food halls. That saturation is especially evident in the Downtown area, where four food halls — Lyric Market, Finn Hall, Bravery Chef Hall, and Understory — are currently open or in the works. Then there’s Conservatory, Houston’s first food hall, and the forthcoming Politan Row, a Rice Village food hall from the minds behind New Orleans’s famed St. Roch Market.
Oui Eats was originally expected to land in summer 2018, but obviously that timeline has been delayed. Eater has reached out to ABC Realty Advisors, the brokerage behind the project, for more details on Molzan’s involvement, and when Oui Eats is expected to open. Stay tuned for an update.