In the first half of 2024, one area of Houston has lured many of the city’s most anticipated restaurant openings.

Celebrated chef Aaron Bludorn’s Bar Bludorn is still difficult to book a prime-time reservation since debuting just over a month ago. Top barbecue joint the Pit Room opened a second location. A spot for Detroit-style pizza and a neighborhood wine bar also joined the roster of new businesses.

There’s more to come. Restaurateur Levi Goode is currently building out his upscale restaurant Credence with an attached reservation-only speakeasy bar. Flashy Dallas import Haywire, with its party barn and multiple bars, is finalizing its guest list for a preview party. Another Kolache Shoppe is slated for early next year.

There’s an opening every week in a food-obsessed city like Houston, but the new spate of restaurants and bars is no longer concentrated in typically desirable inner Loop neighborhoods like the Heights or River Oaks. Memorial is quickly shedding its reputation as a dining desert and becoming a hotbed of destination-worthy establishments.

“It’s a hot area everyone is trying to get into,” said Michael Sambrooks, the founder of Sambrooks Management, the group behind the Pit Room and its recent expansion from Montrose to Memorial.

Bordered in part by the Katy Freeway, Memorial has long been home to restaurants such as Taste of Texas (one of the highest-grossing independent restaurants in the U.S.) and Jonathan’s the Rub. 

Still, the area has never taken off as a dining haven, despite potential customers working in the Energy Corridor or nearby hospitals. 

Sambrooks, whose restaurants were concentrated within the Loop, had been eyeing Memorial for a few years but got to know the area because his children attend St. Francis, one of the most expensive private schools in Houston.

While at Little League games and school fundraisers, people constantly asked when Sambrooks, who lives in Bellaire, was going to bring the Pit Room to the suburbs.

“(Memorial) always had restaurants, especially corporate ones, but they never had a big representation of independent restaurateurs wanting to build out here,” Sambrooks said. “Now the local guys are chomping at the bit to open out here.”

Danny Evans brought crowd-favorite bar Kirby Ice House, of which he is a founding partner, one block north of Interstate 10 near Gessner just before the pandemic hit. The business not only survived the challenges many restaurants and bars faced the past few years, but it has thrived, with a sprawling space and plentiful parking. New developments, including one by the same people behind M-K-T in the Heights, are popping up next door.

“The area is getting better every year,” Evans said.

Memorial has long been viewed as an affluent area full of mostly white families. But like many other parts of Houston, its population continues to grow and diversify, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. 

Between 2010 and 2020, the population jumped by nearly 8,000 to a total just shy of 53,300. While the demographics are solidly white, there has been an increase in Black, Asian and Hispanic residents. The population overall has also gotten younger.

These factors, combined with the area’s density and high income, are particularly appealing to food and beverage businesses, said Thomas Nguyen, who specializes in working with restaurants at CBRE, a commercial real estate company.

“It’s creating this destiny that’s great for restaurant and retail operators,” Nguyen said.

When a first-time restaurant owner or “hot” concept comes to town, they most often look for spaces within the Loop. But Nguyen said when it’s too expensive there, “they’ll always look at Memorial before they really get to the suburbs.”

Memorial’s proximity to the inner Loop is a lucrative selling point, but the area’s limited real estate makes it competitive, Nguyen added.

Ahead of Bar Bludorn’s opening at 9061 Gaylord, Bludorn noted that the space was a perfect fit for his third restaurant because it was one of the few commercial spaces tucked away from the traffic of Katy Freeway.

“You don’t even know there’s a freeway nearby,” Bludron said. “It’s quieter and feels neighborhood-y.”

Mazen Baltagi tried to lease the current Bar Bludorn space for the fifth location of his coffee shop, Slowpokes. 

He said Memorial’s appeal is not surprising, given that developers are enticed by the area’s home values, household incomes, schools and car traffic.

The first Slowpokes opened in Garden Oaks about eight years ago, long before the area started attracting businesses Houstonians might expect to open in the Loop, Baltagi said.

“Restaurants usually go where the crowd already is — like the Heights,” Baltagi said. “But then you’re small fish in a big pond.”

As Baltagi continues to look for what he describes as “underserved areas,” he’s already planning another opening in Houston’s East End. Jonathan Levine, who started Jonathan’s the Rub more than two decades ago in Memorial, is also headed to that neighborhood for his third location.

For now, the newest operators in Memorial are banking on the area’s appeal and local demand.

“I don’t necessarily want another Houston barbecue restaurant opening next door,” Sambrooks said. “But you hope where you’re going will be the next dining and drinking destination.”