All The News That's Fit To Eat

Restaurants come and restaurants go, sometimes so fast you can barely keep up! Before I even noticed that Café Broadway had closed, Maximito's opened in its place at 606 Broadway SE. Maximito's Chef Eddie Stern was formerly the owner of Tio Tito's, a Mexican restaurant near University and Menaul that he closed about four years ago. Around the same time as the closing of Tio Tito's, Stern's father Maximo passed away. The new restaurant is named for him. As for the food, Stern describes Maximito's menu as, “exactly the same as Tio Tito's but I've gotten better over the past few years.” Among the Mexican dishes like nachos, tostadas, burritos, enchiladas, fajitas and chimichangas lie a number of vegetarian entrées and vegan possibilities. The beans and rice are both vegan, Stern says, and many dishes can be made with vegetables but without cheese. Stern and his girlfriend, owner Julie Dahl, also remodeled the space, building bancos around the dining room, adding splashes of bright color with fresh paint everywhere. Call 242-1222 for hours and information.

And in the running list of restaurants that are closing, Lindy's second location at University and Menaul, which opened a mere seven months ago, closed in November. Owner Steve Vatoseow the restaurant closed due to conflicts among the owner/partners not because business had been bad. He hopes to reopen another Lindy's in the future. Meanwhile, the original diner at Fifth and Central remains open and unusually busy for the holiday season.

Sources also report that Purple Afternoon Café closed up shop. They were the ones who got us all excited about bubble tea, too. Oh well, you can always check out Café O (Montgomery and Wyoming, 858-0301) where they serve a huge variety of bubble teas and snacks, including delicious Vietnamese rice-paper rolls.

Meanwhile, the cold weather has hurt business at Sauce (Fourth and Central) enough that they chose to close for lunch until spring when they expect to reopen both patios (including the Raw patio).

On a lighter note, I know a couple whose generally very well-behaved dog very nearly ruined their holiday dinner. It seems that while my friend was in the shower and her husband was otherwise occupied, their dog jumped up on the counter and dragged away the ham she had spent hours basting with Coke (yes, it's true and it's good). Any question of whether the ham was salvageable disappeared when the glass platter it was resting on shattered all over the kitchen floor and the meat. Luckily the dog didn't fatally ingest any glass shards and luckily the very kind folks at Honeybaked Hams agreed to stay open a few minutes late so that the man of the house could race up there for a spiral cut ham. Hooray Honeybaked Hams! Baaaaad dog!