The Logbook of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy

The League Kitchen & Tavern in Lakeway is closing on February 25th, according to a post on NextDoor. This is backed up with a photo of the sign on the door.

This is not a great tragedy. There’s another League Kitchen & Tavern a little more than three miles down the road (in the Hill Country Galleria), and two more in the Avery Ranch area and near Dripping Springs. Also, the parent company, TC4 and Co., owns the Tony C’s pizza chain, and something called “Cousin Louie’s” (I’ll come back to that) among other restaurants. (The sign mentions “five brands” and “over 20 locations”. Mighty Fine Burgers is one of them, and it seems like they count “Tony C’s Coal Fired Pizza” and “Tony C’s Pizza and Beer Garden” as separate brands.)

When I first became aware of it, it was Ciola’s Italian American Restaurant. I’m not sure what the relationship is between the people who ran that and the Tony Ciola who is a partner in TC4, but I digress. That was sold and briefly rebranded as another Italian restaurant. That Italian restaurant wasn’t able to make payments and was locked out by the Ciola corporate entity, who turned it into The League. I don’t know how long the original Ciola’s was open, but I’m guessing at least a few years before my first visit there, so we’re looking at a shopping center that’s at least 25 years old. Someone in the ND thread mentions that the former anchor tenant in that shopping center was a Piggly Wiggly grocery store, but that’s been gone for a long time.

I mention all of this to sort of set a timeline. The closing notice places the blame on their inability to negotiate a new lease with the landlords. Some of the ND commenters who appear to be superficially knowledgeable about the business claim that this symptomatic of a recent trend: strip center owners want to charge new property rents for places in centers that haven’t been refurbished in 25 years or more. I can’t recall that center being given any kind of makeover since the first time we went to Ciola’s…

We dealt with this issue with a similar older worn out commercial space, when something like the new HEB and development move in next door, they can basically do nothing and double or triple the rent for the same space simple because of proximity. The commercial spaces near the Y, both the WM Cannon and where the previous HEB and Albertsons, now Goodwill, commercials areas are like this as well. They’re practically unusable as far as quality goes, worn out facilities and lack of utilities in many cases, and they’re being rented as if they’re prime space in a mall.

Setting aside the whole question of whether there is such a thing as “prime space in a mall” any longer, I don’t know enough to be able to dispute that argument. But I can see the author may have a point. On the other hand, for the spaces they mentioned, the big problem is…they’re at the “Y” in Oak Hill (the intersection of 290 and 71) which is currently the center of a massive road construction project and probably will be for the next several years. Nobody wants to rent space in the middle of that mess, even if they can get it cheap.

Cousin Louie’s is a “full service Italian-American restaurant” which sounds very much like an attempt to revive the old Ciola’s. The closing notice also says they are planning to open one in Lakeway, but I’m guessing they aren’t going into that space. Where they might go, I have no idea, but I do have one guess. And I haven’t been to the one that’s currently open, which is also out near Dripping Springs, in the same development as The League. I’d propose that to Lawrence for an SDC, except: a) his current lack of a job precludes that, and II) driving all the way out to just short of Dripping Springs is going to be a real tough sell to him and to all the other SDC regulars. Except maybe Andrew “Will Drive Anywhere For Food” W.