Coffee Pot Is Empty

2 hip restaurants bite the bullet in Fort Worth's West 7th District

If this brunch sparks your appetite, you'll need to drive to Dallas to get it. So sorry.

Courtesy photo

Two Dallas concepts imported to Fort Worth's West 7th District closed in January, one serving Mexican food and the other, coffee.

TorTaco, a Mexican restaurant focused on tortas, tacos, bowls, and mezcal, closed on January 22. TorTaco was a member of the Firebird Restaurant Group, which also owns El Fenix and Meso Maya.

A representative for the company released a statement saying that the business at that location just wasn't good enough.

"After nearly 17 months serving the Fort Worth community, we have made the difficult decision to close our TorTaco restaurant at 910 Currie St. effective January 22, 2018," the statement said. "Despite being voted the 'Best New Restaurant in Fort Worth' in 2017, among other accolades, the location has not met our expectations."

Judging by comments online, one of the restaurant's biggest problems was parking. West 7th recently clamped down on parking in the area and is proactively towing those who don't go to a designated business.

TorTaco was the 2017 winner in CultureMap's Tastemaker awards, in the "best new restaurant" category. You'd think that would be enough to keep any restaurant a-flourishing, so that parking situation must really be bad.

The original TorTaco in downtown Dallas remains open, where it will continue to serve its distinctive array of tortas, tacos, and mezcal. Meanwhile, they're seeking other sites around DFW for future TorTaco locations.

Further east, Mudsmith, the coffeehouse located at 817 Matisse Dr. in the So7 development, closed on January 15. This was the second location of the original Mudsmith on Greenville Avenue opened by bar/restaurant owner Brooke Humphries in August 2016. There is also a location of her Barcadia in the same complex.

Mudsmith took over the former Love Shack space, which would seem not to bode well for its prospects; if Tim Love can't make it happen in a location, maybe nobody can. Coffee might have seemed a good idea, with all of the apartments on-site needing morning coffee.

"There just wasn't enough business," said a staffer at the Dallas location — and yet the Starbucks across the street is almost always packed. Do residents of mixed-use developments grasp the idea that you should ideally support the business in your building? Maybe not so much.

The Dallas Mudsmith is "doing great," the staffer says, and Humphries is opening another Mudsmith in Dallas' Centrum Building in the spring.

closings

Chef News

Fort Worth's Will Rogers Memorial Center welcomes bright new chef

FortWorthtx.gov

Will Rogers Memorial Center

There's a new chef in town: Waylon Cornelius, named executive chef of catering and concessions for Craft Culinary Concepts, the food and beverage provider at Will Rogers Memorial Center.

Will Rogers Memorial Center is the 120-acre entertainment complex anchoring Fort Worth’s Cultural District, owned and operated by the City of Fort Worth. Cornelius will oversee menus for trade shows and other events at the center which bring in more than 2 million visitors a year.

Craft Culinary Concepts is headquartered in Glendale, Arizona, and manages food and beverage programs for entertainment, sports and cultural facilities.

Chef Waylon Corneliusfortworthtx.gov

According to a release, Cornelius joined the team this summer and is already shifting the expectations of guests from a typical “BBQ and beans” menu to a bill of fare satisfying every kind of palate.

“We always have fajitas ready to go, but we also make a beautiful Beef Wellington or baked salmon with a pink salt crust,” Cornelius says in a statement.

For consumer trade shows, Craft and its partners Caribou and Taco Heads offer more choices for the thousands of guests who attend events at WRMC annually.

“Some of our equestrian guests are away from home and here for several days, and they need more than popcorn and hot dogs,” Cornelius says. “Our concessions offer biscuits and gravy, burritos made in-house, strawberry salad, fruit and yogurt cups.”

A native of Mansfield, Cornelius grew up helping in a farm-to-table kitchen. He was raised on a farm with his mother, grandmother, and grandfather -- a Vietnam veteran who enjoyed vegetable gardens and raising hogs and chickens. He studied computer science after high school and holds an associate's degree in Cultural Resource Management and Policy Analysis from Tarrant County College.

He's a 2003 graduate of AIMS Academy of Culinary Arts in Dallas where he was mentored by a number of great chefs. While training as assistant executive sous chef at the AAA four-diamond Grand Hyatt DFW, he worked with Executive Chef Sutti Sripolpa, chef Eric Dreyer (who went on to be Oprah Winfrey’s personal chef), and Chef Jean-Claude Plihon, under whom he honed his French cooking skills.

As executive sous chef at the opening of Perry’s Steakhouse and Grille in Southlake, Cornelius gained expertise with volume. While at HG Sply Co., he learned about gluten-free items and other food allergies.

HG Sply is also where he crossed paths with Chef James R. Schell III, Craft’s general manager at WRMC, who recruited Cornelius to the complex.

"James said he needed someone who can hit moving targets, push the culinary team to be more avant-garde and use locally sourced, seasonal ingredients, so here I am," Cornelius says. "Culinary is a small world."

“I want people to say, ‘When we were in Fort Worth, you won’t believe what we got at Will Rogers!’” Schell says. “Even the celebrities who perform [in the auditorium] are surprised. When Chicago played here recently and we served dinner backstage, they said they felt treated like the Rolling Stones.”

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