Restaurants

Into the Arena

By Mark Stuertz 

Former club owner Brad Priebe, who once owned Suede Bar & Grill down on Greenville Avenue and had his fingers in the Dragonfly Bar & Restaurant before it went through its many incarnations (Milkbar, Syn Bar) and burned down and is now a nursery or some such, has joined hands with former Dallas Cowboys special teams coach and one-time Dallas Desperados head coach Joe Avezzano and his son Tony to add some sports bar paraphernalia to Frisco. In October Coach Joe's Sports Grille will enter the Frisco lexicon. Elaborates Priebe: "It's Houston's meets Snuffer's." Yet here he's selling Joe short. Just count the ways: 1) Swelling some 10,000 square feet, Coach Joe's will have three 8-foot-high water walls behind the bar and will be buffed, steroids-like, with plasmas and big screens—30 of them; 2) The 325-seat Coach Joe's will serve Black Angus burgers plus Italian cuisine born of Avezzano home recipes; 3) Four nights per week Coach Joe's will shovel live Red Dirt, or that Americana/alt-country music genre typified by Cross Canadian Ragweed. Added bonus: Coach Joe's will have karaoke—a Frisco favorite—backed up by a live Coach Joe's house band. "Karaoke is big up here," Priebe says. The Priebe-Avezzano combine also plans to scale down Joe's and spread it with a counter service venue called GameDay Grille. GameDay will open in Frisco, Valley Ranch and possibly Southlake and Oklahoma City over the next 24 months.

So what happened to Maguire's Uptown Grille, Mark Maguire's uptown extension of his successful Maguire's Regional Cuisine in North Dallas? Maguire says he buttoned up his grill on Cedar Springs Road after closing for a Fourth of July hiatus. Didn't make sense to reopen. The Grille, which Maguire says took a hit after Dallas' smoking ban was implemented, was generating profits, but not enough—especially since it was squeezing time Maguire could devote to lucrative consulting projects. Then profits failed to fatten in the wake of an advertising deluge. "So...I had to answer the question, 'Do I believe that I can get the revenue at this location up to a level that would allow me to pull away?'" he says in an e-mail. The answer was a resounding "no." Maguire says he is locked in negotiations to sell the fully furnished restaurant to another operator. He also says he intends to open another Maguire's.

CORRECTION: The restaurant Mistra in the new Hilton Hotel in Rockwall will serve strictly Mediterranean cuisine, and not the Pan-Asian Mediterranean hybrid described in Hash Over, July 5. Also, the New Hilton will be called the Hilton Bella Harbor on Lake Ray Hubbard, not the Mariah Bay Hilton Hotel and Conference Center. We regret the errors.