LITTLE ROCK — The new Little Rock Cracker Barrel opened as scheduled Monday in the new Shackleford Crossing shopping center, 2618 S. Shackleford Road, Little Rock. Hours are 6 a.m.-11 p.m. daily; the telephone number is (501) 225-7100. Our opening-day correspondent reports continuing road construction on Shackleford where it crosses over Interstate 430 will take some careful navigating.
Vino's, West Seventh and Chester streets, Little Rock, reopened last weekend after its upstairs office fire, a little subdued after water-damage cleanup (which also caused the management to make a few adjustments with the wiring to bring the old building into compliance with the fire code).
"We were lucky [the fire] happened at 3 in the afternoon," when there were employees and customers on the premises, reports an employee. "If it had happened at 3 in the morning ...." Of course, it didn't hurt to have the city's main fire station across the street. The telephone number is (501) 375-8466.
The Web site for Boston's The Gourmet Pizza, www.bostons gourmet.com, now lists a November opening for the location at 3201 Bankhead Drive, Little Rock, adjacent to the Holiday Inn Airport. Want ads in the Sunday edition of this paper indicate the place is hiring. It will be the second Arkansas location for this chain, which is headquartered not in Boston but in Vancouver, British Columbia. (The other is in Bentonville.) By the way, be careful plugging the URL into your browser - www.bostongourmet.com, without the "s," is the site for a coffee shop - not in Boston either, but in DeLand, Fla.
The River Rock Grill has opened at the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute on Petit Jean Mountain, 1 Rockefeller Drive, Morrilton, which also happens to have a culinary arts program. Hours are 5-10 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. The grill menu is limited - appetizers, soups, salads, sandwiches and entrees, plus a dessert of the day and blended coffee drinks - but will expand in May. The restaurant's name comes from the view out the restaurant windows, according toa news release. Call (501) 727-5435 or visit the Web site, www.uawri. org.
And in our "play-catch-up" department, an alert reader looking for information on Poncho's Villa, which we reported in the summer of 2006 had moved to 123 S. Jeff Davis Ave., Jacksonville, after an odyssey that had taken the restaurant from East Broadway in North Little Rock (two locations) to the Heights in Little Rock, reports the place has been closed, and apparently for some time.
Also closed for some time, alas, is Bohemia, 417 Park Ave., Hot Springs. According to a report in the Hot Springs Sentinel Record that we somehow missed at the time, the owner shut it down last year after illness sidelined his wife.
Has a restaurant opened - or closed - near you in the last week or so? Does your favorite eatery have a new menu? Is there a new chef in charge? Drop us a line. Call (501) 399-3667 or (501) 378-3513, or send a note to Restaurants, Weekend Section, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, P.O. Box 2221, Little Rock, Ark. 72203. Send e-mail to: eharrison@arkansasonline.com
Weekend, Pages 73 on 10/26/2007