Cissi’s Market on South Congress (right in the middle of the hipster district) shut down Friday. SoCo is kind of off the beaten path for me these days, so I never ate there, and really don’t have much to say.
More interesting to me is the closure of Primizie Osteria. (Hattip: Lawrence, who alerted me to this. I haven’t seen it reported anywhere else.) We had an SDC there, and were generally unimpressed (it struck us as very expensive and not worth it). Edited to add: Lawrence has corrected me: I was actually thinking of Sagra Enoteca Trattoria, not Primizie Osteria. Primizie did come up a few times, but we never actually ate there. My apologies to the Primizie management. However, what makes this interesting to me is the note on their website about the reasons they closed:
Although the down economy has not done us any favors, the main reason for our decision is that our landlord, Austin Revitalization Authority, refused to renegotiate the terms of our lease to make them more aligned with industry averages, the location and the density of the area. All of our decisions and projections for the restaurant were based on four multi-use developments which were to have been completed on the 11th/12thstreet corridors. As you probably know from the countless articles on the development of this area, the City of Austin and the Austin Revitalization Authority have failed to deliver on all accounts.
This isn’t the first restaurant closing I’ve seen that’s been blamed on the ARA. As I recall, Ms. B’s closed both of their locations after running into problems with the ARA while trying to open the 11st Street location.
Something like this is perhaps the kind of thing a real newspaper could look into; what other restaurants have gotten involved with the ARA? How many of them have had satisfactory experiences with the ARA? How many have closed, and how much money is the city out from those closures?