Restaurants

Group Owning Geisha House to Launch Sports Bar in Victory

Also: Mico Rodriguez is close to opening the TV-free Twenty 2.

By Mark Stuertz 

From Los Angeles, a steroided-up sports bar finds its home in Victory. "It's kind of like a pub meets ESPN Zone meets Bellagio Sports Bar," says Lonnie Moore of the Los Angeles-based Dolce Group. It's called The Boardroom, a $3.5 million, 7,800-square-foot upscale sports lounge to be injected this summer into the ground floor of the Cirque, the luxury apartments staring down Victory Park. Boardroom will have microbrews on tap, a cavalcade of monster flat-screen TVs and no peanut shell crunch on the floor. "It's going to be sexy," Moore assures. Sporty eats too: shake and bake chicken in a pistachio crust with lobster-mashed potatoes, Kobe sliders and Kobe beef chili cheese dogs. Dolce group (Ketchup, Geisha House, Bella, Ten Pin Alley, etc.) is a 10-unit, $40 million restaurant and lounge concept developer.

While Moore and Dolce are flooding their bar with monster TVs, Mico Rodriguez of the M Crowd (Mi Cocina, Mercury Grill, Taco Diner) is flushing them out. In two weeks Rodriguez will open Twenty 2 ("It's a step above 21"), an 800-square-foot boutique ultra lounge in the Shops at Legacy. "There are no TVs. There's no sports channel. There's no world-class poker," he says. "There's just conversation." In a space for only 40. "At 800 square feet, it was either make it a closet or make it a bar. I couldn't decide. It's very un-North Dallas-like, it's kind of like something you'd find in Tokyo." Rodriguez is also set to launch Taco Sanatico, a taqueria geared for Dallas' ethnic Mexican market. That is if Twenty 2 doesn't break him. "I don't think anybody's ever spent as much money per square inch on a bar as I've spent on this place," he says of his half-million-dollar investment...As was reported here recently, Mi Piaci's Brian and Sonya Black shut down Il Sole Restaurant & Wine Bar in Travis Walk. The culprit? Robert Colombo's "organic pasta-ria" Villa-O, just opened in the defunct Samba Room space. "To say we were disheartened is an understatement," says Black. "After eight and a half years of being in that location, our landlord decided to go ahead and put an Italian food restaurant right next door to us." Black says they're scouting for a more amenable Il Sole location.