Houston’s newest luxury hotel is ready to reveal the restaurants that will serve its guests and visitors. Scheduled to open in December, the Thompson Hotel will ultimately house three dining concepts.
They are:
- Sol 7, a casual restaurant on the pool level that will open with the hotel
- Chardon, a French brasserie that will open in spring 2024
- Buck 40, an upscale supperclub that will open in summer 2024
The hotel has partnered with TableOne Hospitality to operate all food and beverage operations. A spinoff of the acclaimed Mina Group, the Las Vegas-based company is led by CEO Patric Yumul, who is a former president of celebrity chef Michael Mina's Mina Group. The executive tells CultureMap that TableOne’s existing relationship with Hyatt led to an introduction to the Thompson’s developers.
“We hit it off. We have very strong passions about how we see hospitality and food and beverage that align really well together,” Yumul says. “We both speak from the same book. Ultimately, we had a pretty good kinship and a vision for what the space can become and we decided to work together.”
All three restaurants will be led by executive chef Alexandre Viriot. A Dallas native, Viriot’s resume includes stints working for three of the world’s most accomplished French chefs — Guy Savoy, Joël Robuchon, and Alain Ducasse, for whom he spent six years working at restaurants in Saint Petersburg, Doha, Paris, and Macau. Most recently, he’s been working with TableOne as the leader of La Société Bar & Café, a French restaurant at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Downtown SOMA.
Yumul adds that Viriot has recently moved to Houston to begin building relationships with farmers and other purveyors whose ingredients will ultimately be used in the restaurants’ menus. While his professional resume speaks for itself, Yumul cites other qualities that also make him a fit to lead such a complex project.
“Once you get to know him, he’s a sweet and lovely human being,” Yumul says. “I like to think of people as a thermostat. He brings energy to a space.”
Of course, chef Viriot’s extensive experience preparing French food will be reflected in Chardon’s menu. Pitched as a modern brasserie, the restaurant will take a lighter approach to traditional French fare. For example, the chef might served smoked salmon rillettes instead of traditional pork rillettes.
“When you have a love affair with French cuisine, you want to exploit it,” Yumul says. “We love the idea that not everybody has the opportunity to visit France, but everybody has an idea of what it might be like there. That’s what we want to embody with this restaurant and really tell the story of every day French cooking in a craveable and delicious way.”
Buck 40 will be a more elevated supper club grounded in classic American cuisine. The fine dining restaurant will feature both tableside and experiential service touches as well as nightly live music from a stage located at the central bar.
“The vision for Buck 40 is almost a kind of soiree that happens on a nightly basis,” Yumul says. “If you can imagine celebrating the heyday of Houston’s oil baron days and reimagining what a supper club could have been like back then at somebody’s house.”
All three restaurants are one part of the dining options at The Allen, the mixed-use development that includes the Thompson Hotel. They’ll be joined by two restaurants from Los Angeles-based hospitality company Noble 33 — Toca Madera, a Mexican-inspired steakhouse, and Meduza Mediterrania, an Eastern Mediterranean concept. Scheduled to open this fall and in early 2024, respectively, the restaurants will be part of The Pavilion at The Allen, a building that’s adjacent to the hotel.
The Thompson Hotel will occupy floors 8-15 of a 35-story tower that will also include The Residents at The Allen, luxury condominiums on floors 16-35. In total, the building is expected to contain 174 hotel rooms, including 34 suites, and 99 condos.
Thompson Houston Hotel/Facebook
The Thompson Hotel will open in December.
