As Nancy reported earlier on SideDish, that new restaurant at Dallas’s Klyde Warren Park is expected to help support the park’s ongoing operations. So, how much dough will the park pooh-bahs be looking for exactly? According to Jody Grant, chairman of the Woodall Rodgers Park Foundation, a pretty good chunk. The park’s annual operating budget will be about $2.5 million to $3 million, Grant says, and “our challenge will be to run the park on a break-even basis.” He hopes the Savor/Relish venture–a partnership between HM Capital Partners chairman John Muse (photo by Billy Surface) and chef John Coleman, formerly with the Ritz-Carlton here–will “cover as much as 20 percent of our budget–that’s total, for food and beverage services in the park, including catering.”
Don’t expect to sit down for a fancy meal there once the park opens next weekend, though. “The restaurant will open after the park does. We anticipate in the June, July timeframe of 2013,” Grant says. “We might be able to get it open sooner than that, but everything has to work perfectly. Building this restaurant on top of the bridge has been very complex, so what we thought was a perfect plan turned out not to be so perfect. The devil’s very much in the details. Even with simple things, like signage, for example. We’ve spent hours and hours just dealing with the signage issues–how to do it tastefully, so that we don’t have so many signs sticking up that it looks like a cemetery, is a challenge!” Grant made the comments in a special issue of D Magazine about Klyde Warren Park that’s due to “drop” next week.
