Buffalo Bayou Grows Up

Urban brewery is on tap at Sawyer Yards with $14 million complex and 200-seat restaurant

One of Houston’s most creative breweries will soon have a space worthy of its ambitions. Buffalo Bayou Brewing Company announced Monday that it will soon begin construction on a massive, $14 million, 28,000-square foot, three-story complex in Sawyer Yards, the arts-and-entertainment district just west of downtown.

Anyone who’s been to Buffalo Bayou’s current facility near T.C. Jester and I-10 immediately understands the need for a larger facility. Opened before Texas laws changed and allowed breweries to sell beer directly to consumers for on-premises consumption, the cramped warehouse lacks the space both to meet demand from the breweries customers and amenities like air conditioning that have made taprooms a gathering spot for craft beer lovers across the Houston area.

The new facility will allow the brewery to expand its production capacity and provide visitors with a more comfortable space for eating and drinking. That's good news for fans who've followed the brewery from humble beginning through the production of 70 different beers in less than six years.

Buffalo Bayou founder and CEO Rassul Zarinfar tells CultureMap that he began looking for a new facility back in 2014. He identified the property as a good site but discovered that he was bidding against Sawyer Yards owner Jon Deal and partner Steve Gibson for the space. Thankfully, they had friends in common who connected the two parties.

“Lauren Barrash (CEO of The Wave) connected me with Jon and Steve. She’s the O.G. matchmaker,” Zarinfar tells CultureMap. “It just worked out. It’s such a small town. Everyone knows everyone.”

Once connected, the parties had mutual interest in working together, but Zarinfar says Deal challenged him to develop a design that would match the energy of the artists' studios that are part of the property.

“It’s such a carefully constructed vibe, and it’s so special. That’s what made the architecture so hard,” Zarinfar says. “Jon and Steve reclaimed old buildings, and we’re going brand new . . . You’ve really got to thread the needle, but it was a really fun design process.”

Working with Method Architecture, Buffalo Bayou developed a “theater-in-the-round” design that puts the brewing operations at the center of the facility with the public spaces and offices around it. Windows in both the first floor tasting bar and the second-story restaurant will offer visitors a view of the brewing operations. On the third floor event space, a 30-foot long skylight will allow people to look into the production facility, or they can stand on a patio and gaze at the downtown skyline.

“We always call ourselves an 'urban brewery,' and we’re challenging ourselves (with this design),” Zarinfar says. “Almost every place in the building you’ve got a face full of urban and a face full of brewery.”

Plans for the 200-seat restaurant are still coming together. Zarinfar has ideas about merging products from the brewing with dishes created with beer — for example a spent-grain bread bowl filled with Buffalo Bayou chili — but said he wants to allow the restaurant’s future chef to be as creative as possible. While Zarinfar says he'd much rather talk about the two kinds of orange peel used in the brewing of Great White Buffalo than the reclaimed materials that will be incorporated into the space, he can't contain his excitement about what the future holds.

“This will be good, because I think what’s happening is people want to touch, feel, and understand everything about the brewery,” Zarinfar says. “Our mission has always been to educate and entertain. I think this will be an opportunity to build a cathedral, where we can teach people what we do. And A/C, which is always nice.”

Buffalo Bayou Brewing Co is building a 28,000-square foot, three-story brewery in Sawyer Yards.

Courtesy of Buffalo Bayou Brewing Co.

Buffalo Bayou Brewing Co is building a 28,000-square foot, three-story brewery in Sawyer Yards.

craft-beer 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 violations 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.

crime interview