Mud-Linging

Little did those at Texas Monthly‘s A-list party at Ling & Javier last month know the soiree would be a swan song for the overly trendy spot inside Hotel Derek. The partygoers came to see and be seen, not to eat, and that was the attitude that ultimately killed the restaurant.

Ling & Javier, the Chinese/Cuban concept known as one of the best celebrity-spotting joints in town, closed its doors September 14 and will reopen Thursday the 19th as Maverick, a Southwestern comfort-food eatery with a whiskey and tequila bar. The radical redo comes just ten months after cb5 Restaurant Group opened the location, which is owned and run by Soybomb Beverage, a subsidiary of cb5.

“I think from a restaurant and community standpoint, it just missed the mark,” says Kingsley “K.C.” Sorber, managing director of Maverick. “It was a really cool bar, but the reality was it was a restaurant.”

Former sous-chef Darshon Haines concurs: “No one came in to eat; it was a nightclub. I know they were losing money. For the bar to capture 65 to 75 percent of the business, with that kind of menu and that kind of staff and the payroll for the staff, that was a disaster.”

Sorber thinks the concept was just too hip for Houston and says cb5 plans to try the Ling & Javier plan — fusion food, big bar and DJ — in another market, likely Los Angeles. “I think the environment may have made it hard to enjoy the food,” he says.

Others, however, thought the food was just plain hard to enjoy. The Press‘s own Robb Walsh (“Supermodel Cuisine,” February 7) wrote that “the food is all extraordinary — in some cases extraordinarily good, but mostly extraordinarily bad.” Two weeks later in the Houston Chronicle, Alison Cook wrote, of Ling & Javier’s coconut lobster, “This is the worst thing I have ever eaten.” Could it be that Houston’s restaurant critics are just not hip enough to recognize good food in a nightclub setting?

Doubtful, since the restaurant staff sometimes had a tough time spotting it even in the well-lit kitchen. “I thought some of it was pretty good and some of it needed a lot of work,” says one former staffer. He characterizes executive chef Alena Pyles, whose brother is Stephan Pyles of Star Canyon fame, as “good, really good, but very inconsistent.”

“She would have all of these specials for special days,” says Haines of Pyles, “but they never prepared the staff. On Valentine’s Day [a week after the first scathing review], we were supposed to have this special dinner, and I showed up in the kitchen and still didn’t know what the dishes were going to be. So things went wrong, and she threw a fit.” Another former staffer corroborates that menu changes were never shared with the kitchen line until the day of rollout. “It was pretty frustrating,” he says.

But there will be no more coconut lobster with orange rum sauce, no more supermodel-sized portions, no more Ling & Javier. No sir, now the Hotel Derek restaurant will serve what Sorber calls “food your grandmother would make.” Fried green tomatoes, crispy fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, big ol’ Texas rib eyes and buttermilk pie. And who’s in the kitchen whipping up all the goodies? Not your grandmother but Alena Pyles.

Sorber says he has a good working relationship with Pyles and was unaware of any problems in the kitchen. In fact, he raves about the old menu. “I thought the food was fantastic,” he says.

So what should we expect when Maverick throws open its doors? Well, according to the press release, “Maverick will be as welcoming as a modern country home. Think suede and fringe…think leather and stripes.” But more to the point, new restaurants are often plagued by inconsistencies, and the Maverick menu will have little time to warm up. Sorber says the kitchen staff is being trained on the new dishes but will use the soft opening to work out the kinks. “We’ll have the hotel guests and the bar crowd [from Ling & Javier] to practice on before we have a grand opening,” he says. He plans to do a major push for the new restaurant, including charity functions and advertising. An invitation-only grand-opening party is scheduled for September 26.

Sorber is hoping to keep Ling & Javier’s desired demographic: 25- to 50-year-old professionals. But with all the restaurant choices in Houston, particularly in the Galleria area, going down-home Texas could be risky business. Hotel Derek is spitting distance from the popular Sullivan’s Steakhouse.

Sorber didn’t want to talk about how many covers or how much money it will take to make Maverick a success. “My biggest desire is to be a culinary success; the numbers come later,” he says. Sorber has a 20-year history in the food business, having been everything from a chef to restaurant Web site developer; most recently he was vice president of the Fort Worth-based Reata Restaurant Group, a $10 million-a-year enterprise. He definitely cares about the numbers, but he’s right that the cuisine has to come first. Maverick has plenty of critics, cooks and customers to win over.