introducing the marigold club

Power Houston hospitality group taps fine dining chef for new Montrose restaurant

Austin Waiter will lead The Marigold Club.

Photo by Emily Jaschke

One of Houston's most prominent restaurant groups has revealed its latest project. Goodnight Hospitality will open The Marigold Club in the former Goodnight Charlie's space.

To bring The Marigold Club to life, Goodnight partners Bailey and Peter McCarthy recruited Tony's chef Austin Waiter to be the new restaurant's executive chef and partner. Details are light, but Waiter's menu will focus on modern continental cuisine paired with Goodnight's signature flair for design and first-rate beverage offerings.

"I'm thrilled to be joining forces with the Goodnight Hospitality team,” Waiter said in a statement. "When I first heard about The Marigold Club, I was hooked. I've been searching for a place that is inventive, hip, and exciting with a talented team to learn from. The team and I are aligned in cultivating a dining experience that is built to transport our customers. I love how much thought and detail the Goodnight team puts into their concepts. I can’t wait to get started.”

The Marigold Club will join tasting menu restaurant March, casual Rosie Cannonball, and Montrose Cheese & Wine at the Goodnight Hospitality complex on Westheimer. Goodnight chef-partner Felipe Riccio sees Waiter as an ideal fit for the new restaurant, which will draw upon a culinary philosophy that dominated post war America but has since fallen out of fashion.

"The goal with The Marigold Club is to tap into the wealth of variety that modern continental cuisine will afford us, while still keeping our eye on a foundation," Riccio said. "The menu will take cues from a French and American era of cooking that, as young chefs, Austin and I didn’t get to personally execute in a kitchen but still made up a big part of our culinary training. Modernizing that style of cooking with our own take will be exciting."

Those who have long memories of the Houston culinary scene will recall that the McCarthys once planned to open a restaurant with former Tony's chef Grant Gordon, but his unexpected death meant those plans never came to fruition. The Marigold Club isn't intended to replace The Edmont, but the connection is worth noting.

"Grant Gordon was singular,” Bailey McCarthy said. "It would be impossible to recreate his vision without him, and we would never try. That said, Pete and I hold his memory close in everything we do. It is meaningful to us that Grant and Austin worked together, albeit briefly, and we hope we all make him proud with The Marigold Club.”

Waiter became Tony's chef de cuisine in 2017 at the age of 26. He earned raves for his ability to balance the restaurant's classic dishes with his own flair. Starting at a new concept without any expectations for specific dishes means the sky's the limit for the talented chef.

"I’m thrilled to partner with Austin on The Marigold Club," Riccio added. "His command of an institution like Tony’s has always inspired me. I think the freedom that this concept will provide him will really showcase his talents.”

news-you-can-eat openings

Chris Cusack explains

Houston bar owner speaks out about surprise arrest for health code violations

Photo by Sergio Trevino

Chris Cusack owns two locations of Betelgeuse Betelgeuse.

Certainly one of the most unusual interactions between a restaurant and City of Houston officials took place on Wednesday, May 6 when Betelgeuse Betelgeuse owner Chris Cusack was arrested for health code violations at his location on Washington Avenue.

News of the arrest spread quickly across social media over the weekend. Now, Cusack is ready to tell his side of the story.

Cusack, whose time operating restaurants in Houston goes back more than 15 years to Down House and its affiliated restaurants such as Hunky Dory and D&T Drive Inn, tells CultureMap the problem began on Monday, May 4 when a health department inspector came to Betelgeuse Betelgeuse and asked to see the restaurant’s grease trap.

The only problem is that location has never had a grease trap. Prior to becoming Betelgeuse Betelgeuse, it was Liberty Station, a pioneering bar in Houston’s craft beer and craft cocktail scenes. In the early days, Betelgeuse served food from a food truck. More recently, it prepares its food next door at The Bell and Crane. Cusack acknowledges he didn’t share this information with the inspector.

“Usually I’m a charmer with the health department, but I was a little defensive. She kept asking me. I said, ‘ma’am, we don’t make food here,’” he explains. “The tone wasn’t my finest moment, but there was no name calling or anything like that. She said, ‘where does the food come from?’ I said, ‘it doesn’t matter where it comes from. It’s produced in a commercial kitchen.’”

Cusack says he knew there would be a follow up, but he was shocked when the inspector returned two days later with more colleagues from the health department, TABC inspectors, and Houston Police Department officers.

“I got somewhere between 21 and 25 citations,” Cusack says about the return visit. He got dinged for everything from graffiti in the bathroom to a missing Harris County tax stamp on the photo booth he leases from a vendor (it has both State of Texas and City of Houston stamps, Cusack says).

One inspector told Cusack he needed a food dealer’s permit. He showed the inspector that a food dealer’s permit had been issued for the restaurant's address under the former food truck’s LLC but not to the LLC that operates Betelgeuse Betelgeuse. Cusack says he had renewed the food truck’s permit in March, but that wasn’t good enough for the inspector. In Cusack’s telling, he was arrested for not having the permit, since it was also flagged as missing in an inspection from October 2025. He's the only person he knows who has ever been arrested for a misdemeanor violation of the health code.

Cusack says he spent 21 hours in the Harris County Jail. When he got out, he says he was contacted by a more senior official within the Health Department. Once Cusack confirmed he owned both LLCs, he was told he could reopen. Both locations of Betelgeuse Betelgeuse have been operating normally since Friday, May 8.

Cusack maintains he never knew about the October 2025 inspection, which is why he renewed the food dealer’s permit for the food truck’s LLC rather than applying for one under Betelgeuse Betelgeuse’s LLC. “There’s no paper trail that shows I was given this information,” he says. “I did not get the email [from the Health Department].”

As for why things got so out of hand, Cusack theorizes he was a victim of Houston Mayor John Whitemire’s crack down on “reckless behavior” on Washington Avenue and stepped up enforcement on bars generally that led to the temporary closure of near northside cocktail bar Rabbit’s Got the Gun.

Cusack says he’s a “huge supporter” of efforts to reduce crimes like street racing, drug dealing, and sex trafficking along Washington and in its surrounding neighborhoods. Still, he feels targeting by the city for being impolite to a health inspector.

He plans to fight both the arrest and the citations in court. “I want the charges dropped, and I want it expunged completely from my record. That’s the first thing, and I’m going to try very hard to do it,” he says.

“That’s going to end up costing thousands of dollars just to deal with the sheer volume,” he adds.

CultureMap contacted Mayor Whitmire’s office. A representative said the mayor was not aware of the situation and has no comment on an open investigation.

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