Covington's Southern Hotel to Expand

 The place residents and tourists go in downtown Covington is North New Hampshire Street where the Southern Hotel is located.  The Southern Hotel not only is a place for visitors but also holds several movie houses that show all genres of films.  Within the next couple of years, The Southern Hotel will see another expansion. The project will take The Southern Hotel and expand it to cover the entire block.

Along with the expansion, there will be a new restaurant by BRG Hospitality and a renovated Star Theater. The Star Theater will offer a boutique bowling alley, upscale lounge and music stages.  The expansion has around $17 million in new investments and will be considered the largest transformation of the historic district since the renovation of The Southern Hotel in 2014.

The Southern Hotel boasts 48 rooms and is a boutique-style hotel in the heart of downtown Covington.  With the expansion, it is planned to add additional rooms, condos and retail space.  The retail space will be modeled after the 1940s-era storefronts and there will be an additional 43,000 square-foot Mission-style building built on land.  The new building will be named the Summer House and have retail space on the first floor,  hotel rooms on the second floor, a full-service spa on the third floor and four condos on the fourth floor.  The total new building will cost around $11 million.

The Star Theater, a 1942 movie house, will be renovated and will be the largest of the downtown Covington Theaters.  The theater has been vacant since Katrina and before was split into two theaters in the 1970s. The $3 million to $5 million project will include a six-lane boutique bowling alley, and an upscale lounge.  Eventually there will be plans for a roof-top lounge with stages for small acoustic bands.

“We had gone past it so many times, I tried for six months to negotiate a purchase,” said Warren Salles referring to the Star.

The new restaurant by BRG Hospitality will be called TAVI and will be housed in a former barbershop and law office.  TAVI will be under Fariz Choumali, who has been leading the kitchen at Shaya, and will offer a Israeli-Lebanese inspired menu.

“Downtown is becoming a night-time destination, and we have to embrace that,” says Covington Mayor Mark Johnson.  The area has already begun to see an increase in activity since the restrictions from the pandemic were lifted.  “We’re not Mayberry anymore. We’re Mayberry on steroids,” says Johnson.

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A New Post-Production Unit Now on the Northshore

New Orleans has a great film production industry so it is no wonder People Who Think, a Mandeville-based advertising agency, is creating a new post-production company. The agency is headed by Republican strategist Jay Connaughton and will call the spin-off production company Cadence Post.

Cadence Post, the new company, has four employees and expects the number to double over the next year. The company is currently run by Rick Nelson.

"The sheer amount of work that has come back to the city in the last two years is outstanding," Nelson said. "But there hasn't been a lot of growth on the post-production side of things so we need to respond by building out that infrastructure."

Currently, Film New Orleans has 11 television and movie productions that will be filmed now through mid-September. This number includes "Queen Sugar" and "Heart of a Lion." Right now, the film promotion agency will send their raw footage back to Los Angeles or Atlanta to a more traditional filmmaking center. Nelson wants to fill this gap. These can include daily management and "sling shot" services, partnering with Los Angeles or New York as their on-the-ground entity while they're shooting locally.

Their advertising agency has worked with big brand name campaigns for Coca-Cola, Mellow Mushroom, Welch's Snack Foods and Chevron. Currently, they are working on an advertising campaign for Rev Broadband and have worked on programs for Outdoor Channel and Lifetime in the past.

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The Gloriette a New Restaurant in the Southern Hotel

The Gloriette, the new restaurant in the Southern Hotel in Covington, opened just after Mardi Gras. Amy and Jeffrey Hansell, who owns the Thorny Oyster, in Mississippi, opened the Gloriette which takes the place of Oxlot 9. The restaurant glorifies local Louisiana cuisine and offers drinks at the bar, Cypress Bar which is connected to the restaurant.

The new restaurant has a "theme of garden verdure" which compliments the old oaks outside of the hotel. Hence the name the Gloriette which means a garden pavilion in French. Patrons can view these oaks through the dining room that is lined with windows. The restaurant has white tile floors with baby blue walls and lattices. Among the walls are murals of blooms and garden scenes.

A veteran of the local culinary scene, executive chef Steven Marsella has an amazing way of creating dishes from local French cuisine. Marsella is from Providence, Rhode Island where he completed culinary school and began his career "at one of the city's most ambitious seafood restaurants." In New Orleans, he helped open Emeril's Restaurant and recently was the corporate chef for Creole Cuisine Restaurant Concepts.

The French-inspired menu has many dishes that the chef himself created. Dishes include pork and clams Alentejana, crab gumbo, oyster stew, steak tartare and steamed mussels with Calvados, fried oysters with brie fondue, and a crawfish tagliatelle and lank of flounder thickly encrusted with crab and torn morsels of brioche. There are also fabulous desserts at the St. Tammany restaurant. These include apple galette and strawberry trifle.

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The Pontchartrain Vineyards Has New Owners

 Monica Bourgeois and Neil Gernon, a New Orleans couple, decided to purchase Pontchartrain Vineyards last November after they visited the winery's Jazz'n the Vines events featuring Charmaine Neville. The wine spot was put up for sale last summer.

“You could see every star, it was one of the most charming things I’ve ever seen,” Bourgeois said.

The couple will plan to reopen the vineyard under the new name Wild Bush Farms & Vineyards. They love the vineyard but want to put their own stamp on it. They have painted the tasting room walls and replaced the furniture. That will add a ping pon table, frisbee golf and a movie screening area. The couple will keep the traditional Jazz'n the Vines events every spring and fall.

“It’s going to be this really cool viticulture playground out here,” she said. “There are hardly any wineries in Louisiana and I don’t know anyone that’s trying to do what we are going to attempt to do out here. We're going to do the style of wines we would enjoy drinking from around the world: thoughtful, honest, sustainable wines and that’s what we want to focus on, building an ecosystem, producing things of nutritional value that are beautiful.”

Monica and Neil are no strangers to the wine industry. Both worked in the wine distribution and retail industry on Magazine Street in New Orleans. In fact, in 2009 the couple, along with a vineyard owner in Napa, founded Vending Machine Wines. The results were nice red blends with California grapes and Louisiana flare.  There was a Double Shotgun, a Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot blend, and a Cabernet Sauvignon called Crooked Mayor, which she said “speaks for itself.”

"We'll have a lot of different offerings for a lot of different people," Bourgeois said.

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