Reata responds: Here’s a new hint about the Fort Worth restaurant’s next location
Reata Restaurant is looking in the downtown area for its new 2024 location, the restaurant announced this week in its first response to an public invitation last week from the Omni Fort Worth hotel.
In a two-line announcement at the bottom of a newsletter, the restaurant emailed: “Reata continues to look at some great locations in and around Downtown Fort Worth.”
“We are reviewing architectural drawing and renderings,” the announcement read, “to find a great new home for Reata.”
Reata owner Mike Micallef has said the restaurant will leave its current location, 310 Houston St. in Sundance Square, when that lease ends in June 2024.
Micallef had declined to respond after Omni executive Bob Rowling told a downtown business audience April 15 the hotel is “talking to some downtown restaurants” about relocating to help “activate” the West Lancaster Avenue side of new 400-room second tower, 1500 Houston St.
“It would be really exciting for that to happen,” Rowling said, without naming a particular restaurant.
Micallef has not hinted at a decision.
But he has already said the increased convention and tourist business downtown still make the city center attractive to Reata, the restaurant that launched “cowboy cuisine” and produced a generation of chefs known for contemporary Western cooking.
In March 2022, when Reata announced the search for a new location, Micallef said the restaurant would be seeking 2 acres of land or a 12,000-20,000-square-foot building with up to 200 parking spaces.
At the time, Micallef and other retailers said that the increased price of valet and surface parking hurts business in Sundance Square.
Sundance garage parking is free weekdays with validation, weeknights and weekends. But the garages are a two-block walk from Reata.
