A team that owns one Greenville Avenue restaurant is planning to open another. Sameer Patel and Patrick Bruce, who own Lower Greenville hotspot Feed Company eatery + bourbon lounge, have landed the former Crown & Harp's space, which itself is big news. They plan to open a new restaurant called Leela's Raw Bar plus a companion bar called ABV Establishment — ABV standing for Alcohol By Volume, the measure of how much alcohol is in a beverage.
It's a dual-concept restaurant-bar they hope to open in January 2018 — once they get their funding all set.
Feed Company is the restaurant that Patel and partners opened in June in the former Nandina space, across from Taco Cabana. They've won over diners in the neighborhood by serving breakfast all the time and by offering an expansive collection of bourbons and a customer-friendly approach to serving it in which you can get a taster for a nominal price or order a full pour.
Located at 1914 Greenville Ave., in the space that was also home to The Crown & Harp pub, Leela’s & ABV is a multi-faceted upscale dining and drinking concept, with a raw bar and wine bar on the first floor and a speakeasy-style craft cocktail bar on the second floor.
Leela's Raw Bar is inspired by Napa Valley, and will serve seasonal, market-driven plates and oysters from throughout North America in an open-air, bright interior featuring an oyster shucking station and meat slicing counter.
ABV Establishment — which the owners want to call "abv establishment" but no, that lower-case thing just cannot happen — will serve Prohibition-style cocktails and light snacks, such as flavored popcorns and sliders. The space will be sultry, with a separate street-level entrance complete with a cheetah-print staircase and grand chandelier. Everything about that sounds so right (the lower-case thing notwithstanding).
The beverage program at Leela's & ABV will include 20 classic cocktails and 25 wines on tap. Patel calls the ability to purchase fine wine in kegs "a game changer" for the industry. "Wines that previously were only accessible through pricey bottles will now be available by the glass, on tap at Leela's," he says.
To raise capital for the buildout of Leela's & abv, Sameer and Patrick have launched a campaign with NextSeed, a Houston funding portal, stating that crowdfunding is not merely a way to get money, but also "one of the best ways for us to get the word out about our project and engage with the public."
