Latest news with #OysterHouse
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Yahoo
3 Phoenix-area bar shootings in May have left 4 dead and communities reeling
A series of shootings at local bars in May have rattled people across metro Phoenix. The shootings have been in three different cities and different settings. One was at a longtime student haunt nestled in a Tempe neighborhood. Another was at a Glendale restaurant open for about a year near the historic downtown. The third was in a Peoria strip mall off a major roadway. They led to the deaths of four people and injured several more. Linda Hubbard, who lives in a house behind the Peoria strip mall where the latest shooting occurred, was surprised to hear of the incident, saying the bar was usually a quiet spot except for the occasional drunk, disorderly person or a loud car. "Every now and then, somebody will come around from the bar and walk down the street, and you can hear a ruckus on the corner over here," Hubbard said. "But as a rule, that bar is pretty quiet. People over there, they don't branch out into the neighborhood." A fight led to a shooting May 3 outside Casey Moore's Oyster House in Tempe, police said. Dakota Barnes, 30, was leaving the establishment when another man punched him in the head, according to court records. Barnes responded by shooting the man in the stomach, the records said. When a neighbor came outside with a cell phone, Barnes threatened the neighbor to put the phone away or he would "come back," according to court records. When Barnes tried to leave with his girlfriend, the man who was shot jumped on the hood of Barnes' car, but the car swerved, and the man fell off, the records said. Barnes was arrested and faced multiple felony charges. On May 4, a mariscos and steak restaurant on the edge of historic downtown Glendale, less than a block away from police headquarters, became the scene of a mass shooting that killed three people and injured several others. Police say a fight broke out at a dance party on the patio of El Camaron Gigante as it was winding down. The event was thrown by On A Sunday Afternoon, a lifestyle brand founded by Bobby Luera. Security removed the people involved in the fight. Soon after, gunfire erupted. Brothers Damien Anthony Sproule, 17, and Christopher Juaquin Sproule, 21, as well as Milo Christopher Suniga, 21, were killed, according to police. Family members said the brothers were at the event to make friends with fellow lowrider fans. Suniga's cousin, Veronica Tarango, told The Arizona Republic at a community vigil on May 6 that he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught in the crossfire. Suniga wasn't a violent or confrontational person, she said. Five people were injured: two men, 20 and 23; two women, 20 and 21; and a 16-year-old boy, police said. A shoot-out at a Peoria sports bar killed one man and injured another person May 20. Police officers were dispatched to the Deli Sports Bar, near the Loop 101 Agua Fria Freeway and Peoria Avenue, at about 11:30 p.m. for a disorderly conduct call. Dispatchers could hear a man on the call arguing with a bar employee who refused to serve him. The man, later identified as 46-year-old Mario Franco from El Mirage, was refused service due to extreme intoxication, police said. Franco went to the parking lot, retrieved a firearm from his vehicle and fired into the air several times before shooting into the business, police said. One bar patron was injured. Franco then pointed the firearm at a couple sitting on a park bench outside the bar, police said. The parties began firing back and forth, according to police. Franco was struck and treated for his injuries, but he was pronounced dead at the scene. Republic reporters Jose R. Gonzalez, Helen Rummel and Wren Smetana contributed to this article. This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Phoenix-area bar shootings in May have left 4 dead, many reeling
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Your favorite local restaurant could be coming to an airport terminal near you
This article is part of "Made to Order," a series highlighting the business strategies driving today's food industry. When Sam Mink, the owner of Oyster House, made his way through the Philadelphia airport more than a decade ago, he wondered what it would be like to have a restaurant stationed in one of the international airport's terminals. That may have been a premonition: This spring, Oyster House will open its second location between terminals B and C in the airport. The restaurant will seat 140 people and feature a shell-shucking station, Mink said. He told Business Insider he understands that some people might feel skeptical when they hear the words "oysters" and "airport" in the same breath. But it's a chance Mink — and plenty of other food-and-beverage entrepreneurs across the country — are willing to take for the potential payoffs. Across the US, airports are upping their selection of local eateries, often favoring them over nationally recognized chain restaurants and brands. Over the past two decades, this food-and-beverage trend has unfurled as part of a larger move to make airports feel more welcoming and authentic to their locales. Rather than fill US airports' fluorescent halls with more national chain restaurants, airport operators want to feature food and beverage options that speak to the cities where they're located. "Airports, just like other concessions and concepts out there, are becoming more experiential. The airport that you're visiting can be just as much of a destination as where you're going, so it's a reflection of the local city," Liz Einhorn, a hospitality consultant and the founder of Experience Threee, told Business Insider. Einhorn said that post-pandemic, more people are traveling just for fun, further incentivizing airport leaders to create unique and welcoming experiences. A June report from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company found that leisure travel has become more popular than business travel in recent years. Within the US, travelers seek vacation opportunities year-round, compared to their European and Asian counterparts who tend to travel in the summer, the McKinsey report said. In addition to the forthcoming Oyster House location, the Philadelphia airport is home to the Philly-born coffee roastery Elixr, the brunch favorite Sabrina's Cafe, a Geno's Steaks outpost, and, soon, a Federal Donuts and Chicken. Chicago O'Hare International Airport has Tortas Frontera, from the award-winning chef Rick Bayless, and Berghoff Cafe, a spinoff of the city's historic German eatery. Travelers to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport can visit Lil Woody's Burgers & Shakes, which has five other non-airport locations. The Austin-Bergstrom International Airport features local favorites Salt Lick BBQ and Salvation Pizza. For restaurant entrepreneurs, these partnerships can enhance their marketing strategies by widening brand recognition. They also require less of a hands-on approach than opening an on-the-street store location from scratch, since hospitality-group collaborators take on the bulk of the planning, which can include training staff, designing and building the space itself, and creating the menu. As conduits for mass travel, airports are inherently uniform in their designs. Walking through any given airport can feel like you're moving outside time or space. As Steve Taylor, a professor of psychology who studies consciousness, wrote in an article for The Conversation: "They are liminal zones where boundaries fade. On a literal level, national borders dissolve. Once we pass through security, we enter a no man's land, between countries. The concept of place becomes hazy." Airport business leaders know this, so they aim to turn their airports into more tantalizing and pleasurable experiences, said Melissa K. Montes, the vice president and publisher of Airport Experience News. "At the heart of the industry's efforts is the guest experience," Montes told BI. "For some operators, this means leveraging new technologies or offering innovative products to cater to the evolving needs of a new generation of travelers. For others, the emphasis remains on delivering personalized service that creates meaningful connections with passengers." She added that "experiences" has become a buzzword in the industry, as retailers and restaurateurs focus on strategies for keeping travelers with limited time — and an interest in spending on authentic goods and services — engaged with their offerings. Increasingly, airports achieve that through localized food and beverage concepts in their terminals, said Simon Lorady, a vice president at Jackmont Hospitality, the food-service group responsible for bringing Oyster House, Federal Donuts, and Elixr to the Philadelphia airport. It's a trend Lorady, who began his career working in Philadelphia-area restaurants, said he started to notice about 15 years ago. "Travelers were getting more educated about food. People are traveling more, they're seeing more local and new concepts coming about, especially in these popular cities," Lorady said. These shifting consumer expectations are reflected in the requests for proposals, or RFPs, that Jackmont Hospitality and other concessionaires — the companies responsible for bringing food, beverages, and other products to various markets, like on the street or at stadiums — receive. Instead of asking for Burger King and Auntie Anne's outposts, airports are asking for barbecue joints, seafood restaurants, local roasteries, beer gardens, and other concepts that reflect each location's unique culinary culture, Einhorn said. Once concessionaires view an airport's RFP for localized concepts, they seek out potential partners to collaborate with — often the owners of city-specific eateries. Lorady said that the process of winning an airport hospitality contract is both an art and a science. "They don't tell you the brands they are looking for, but they tell you a category," Lorady told BI. He gave the example of "elevated local coffee" as a category: "Our job is to decipher that category and think, 'What do they really want there?'" In this particular case, it resulted in Jackmont Hospitality bringing Elixr coffee to the Philadelphia airport in August. The process is often driven by concessionaries' personal relationships with restaurant owners and involves ongoing conversations about how the partnership could work since each one can vary based on an airport's requirements for leasing, staffing, and safety, Lorady said. He added that a restaurant's resources and an owner's expectations can also play a role in shaping these partnerships. Some restaurants — say, one that slow roasts its meat for several hours — simply aren't suited for an airport outpost, Einhorn said. Mink said that a hospitality company approached him about expanding Oyster House — his family's storied seafood restaurant — to the airport nearly 10 years ago, but he turned down the offer, unsure if he was ready to expand at the time. Fast forward to 2023, when Lorady contacted Mink with a similar offer. "I was ready to take Oyster House out of Sansom Street and work on this dream of mine," Mink told BI about expanding the business. "I love the fact that it's a licensing deal, that they do a lot of the heavy lifting, and they work with us. I feel like we're partners in creating this restaurant that will be as close to the original one as possible — but obviously, it's not going to be exactly the same." Mink and Jeff Benjamin of Federal Donuts and Chicken — another Jackmont Hospitality partner restaurant — told BI that their collaborations provide an opportunity to market their brands to an audience of hungry travelers. "It's a secondary or tertiary model to have these, what we call, nontraditional sites. It's less for the financial upside and more for the marketing and the visibility as we grow," Benjamin, the CEO of Federal Donuts and Chicken, said. It's also a last chance for travelers to get a taste of local restaurants that they may have missed during the visit — or that they tried and loved — as they're heading back home, Lorady said. Travelers appear to enjoy having more local options — commenters in travel subreddits often rave about their niche airport meals. And locals on business trips — including my father, a Philadelphia native — can enjoy a taste of home, in the form of a Geno's cheesesteak, even after they've moved away. Read the original article on Business Insider
New York Times
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Wowed by a Loft in Philadelphia, and Its Hollywood Pedigree
In 2011, when Sam Mink and Anthony Padilla bought the loft where characters played by Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas had lived in the 1993 movie 'Philadelphia,' there were many things they liked about the space. 'We were totally wowed,' said Mr. Mink, 49, an owner of the Philadelphia restaurants Oyster House and Mission Taqueria. 'It had a roof deck and open floor plan,' plus a ceiling that rose to 16 feet. 'It was in a great location,' added Mr. Padilla, 48, a former paralegal who more recently worked as a bookkeeper for Mr. Mink's business. The building was near grocery stores and restaurants, and came with a prized off-street parking spot. Although the apartment had been changed by previous owners, its Hollywood pedigree provided a neat back story to share with friends. 'You could still see the remnants of the movie inside the place,' Mr. Padilla said, including a wood-burning stove that appeared on-screen. When the couple bought the unit for $630,000, it seemed to have all the space they needed — about 2,000 square feet, with a mezzanine holding two bedrooms. But in 2014, they had a son via surrogacy and realized the home wasn't ideal for young children. As Asher, now 10, began growing up, 'there were a lot of dangerous spots,' Mr. Mink said. 'There were open stairs without risers and a mezzanine railing that a baby or toddler could easily crawl right through.' They added clear acrylic barriers to the railing as a stopgap measure, but as their son grew, they decided a little more space would be helpful too. 'When Asher had a friend over, watching TV or something, we were all in the same space,' Mr. Mink said. They also grew tired of sharing the lone full bathroom. 'It was fine for many years,' Mr. Mink said. 'But we felt like he needed his own space, and we wanted our privacy as well.' So in 2022, when the couple heard that the person renting the apartment next door was leaving, they reached out to the owner with dreams of undertaking a combination. They offered $550,000 for the 1,300-square-foot unit, the owner accepted, and the property closed that October. Viewing the combination as an opportunity to reconfigure the two units into one beautiful home, Mr. Mink and Mr. Padilla hired Hope Velocette, an interior designer and the founder of Velocette Studio, and Sam Kim, a partner at Ambit Architecture. 'As part of my process, it's really important to name a feeling I want people to have as soon as they walk in the place,' Ms. Velocette said. 'At the outset of this project, I wanted people to walk in and feel lifted upward, almost like a cathedral effect.' To do so, she aimed to 'express the verticality' of the space, she said, with tall architectural and decorative features. Mr. Kim suggested creating a few impressive spaces rather than carving the combined unit into too many individual rooms. 'They liked that airy, lofty feeling,' Mr. Kim said. 'So we were really trying to give them that sense of space, at a big scale.' In the end, the team settled on one large expanse for the main living space along a wall of windows, which encompasses a living room, large kitchen and dining area. 'The kitchen is the centerpiece of that main room,' Ms. Velocette said. A 17-foot-long island topped by Calacatta Viola marble provides storage, space to prepare food and room for stools at one end where family and friends can gather. For the dining area, Ms. Velocette designed a sculptural element of dried flowers that sprouts from an LED light ribbon climbing up a Venetian plaster wall. For the living room, she worked with Argent Mirror on a tall, artful glass panel with uneven splashes of antiqued mirror, which she backlit with more LEDs. Next to this double-height space, Ms. Velocette and Mr. Kim enclosed a reconfigured mezzanine with green-painted wood slats. This space holds a new primary suite, a bedroom and bathroom for Asher, and a guest bedroom. The area below is occupied by a mudroom, playroom, laundry room, powder room and flex space that functions as a home office and gym. Scalzo General Contracting began construction in July 2023, and the project was completed last July at a cost of about $1.5 million. 'We wanted a comfortable space for our family that wasn't fussy, but also wanted it to be elevated and elegant,' Mr. Mink said. The renovated home provides exactly that by blending the industrial finishes of an urban loft with a few more luxurious touches. 'We can entertain and have kids over and not have to worry about things.' Although the apartment might now be unrecognizable to fans of the movie 'Philadelphia,' Mr. Padilla has some ideas to celebrate its brush with fame. 'I keep wanting to get stills from the movie and maybe put them up in the bathroom,' he said. 'It would just be fun to give it a little nod.'
