Starting next week, OpenTable.com (a website that allows you to make restaurant reservations online) will be holding their yearly Appetite Stimulus Plan, in which Houston-area restaurants will be offering special three-course menus at a greatly reduced price. From November 17th through the 21st, the restaurants will be offering either lunch or dinner menus or -- in some cases -- both. The price for the lunch menus is $24, while the dinner menus are an......

Earlier this year, it was announced that Bed, Bath & Beyond competitor Linens-N-Things would be closing 120 stores across the country in an effort to cut costs and save their company from liquidation after declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May. At that time, the only stores in Houston to be affected by the nationwide closures were the Post Oak location near the Galleria and the location inside the similarly-plagued West Oaks Mall. However, it......

News broke this morning that all 300 restaurants in the Texas-based Bennigan's chain had mysteriously and suddenly closed overnight, all across the nation. Confused staff reported showing up to work and being met by shuttered doors, while some managers spent their morning calling employees to inform them of the situation. Thousands of waitstaff, line cooks, bartenders and bussers across the country are simply stranded, waiting for any news from Bennigan's on whether or not......

Americans for the Arts' Vice President Policy and Research, Randy Cohen, makes a trip to Houston today to discuss economic impact of the arts results from a recent Cultural Impact Study, which Mayor Bill White formally introduced at the Business of the Arts Luncheon hosted by the Greater Houston Partnership in September. You can view a copy of the study here. This morning's discussion will convey how arts organizations can utilize the findings to......

Could Houston be one step closer to zoning? A few days ago the Houston Chronicle reported that the administration of Mayor Bill White has fast tracked an ordinance that could “whittle the proposed 23-story building — and others like it — down to size.” The ordinance would require developers of certain buildings, in certain areas to submit a traffic study to the city for approval. According to the ordinance's language, "certain types of high-density......

Good morning, Houston. Speaking of problems you didn't know existed, we've got two words for you: Duck dumping. It means leaving domestic ducks in places where they shouldn't be — and it's happening at Hermann Park. People apparently decide their ducks would like to join their brethren at the park, particularly around Easter, but the domestic ducks don't mix with the wild ones that actually live in the park: The domestic ones roost on......

Good morning, Houston. Ever wondered how our state's economy stacked up against the rest of the world? Maybe not, but now there's a map that tells you, whether you care or not. Texas' economy is about the same size of Canada's in terms of GDP, making it the second-largest in the country (we fall behind California, which is comparable to France). Coming in dead last is Wyoming, which was renamed Uzbekistan. >>Wind farm a......

So you've heard all the discussion about how cities must lure the so-called "creative class" if they want to be great places, right? Basically, the idea is that the creative class — knowledge workers, artists, intellectuals and creative types, a subset of workers identified by economist and author Richard Florida — spurs economic power, high-tech industry, new ideas and growth in places that court it. Sounds like something Houston should be trying to attract, right?......

Mayor White traveled to Austin two weeks ago to speak to the state legislature about SB 1317, a bill that would prevent cities from creating ordinances that protect air quality. It was no secret that the bill was targeted at the mayor's recent move to minimize the pollution caused by refineries that lie outside Houston city limits. The bill, authored by State Sen. Mike Jackson (R - LaPorte), was passed by the Senate yesterday, despite......

Houston is well-known as a multicultural, international city. A recent report by the Center for an Urban Future shows what that means for our economy. According to this report, Houston ranks third among the nation's cities in Hispanic-owned businesses and is the home of 16 of the largest 500 Hispanic-owned firms in the country. Additionally, the report ranked Houston sixth in Asian-owned businesses. Houston has the nation's largest Nigerian community and third-largest Vietnamese community. The......

Houston is a big city with big industry and big city pollution problems. Mayor Bill White, unsatisfied with the pollution-control efforts of our state and national governments, has been trying enhance Houston’s ability to sue polluters itself. Right now, each time the city wants to sue a polluter, it has to get approval by the council. White wants the city to be able to sue companies without going through these steps, and also wants to......

"What can we do long-term to accomodate students and provide something different?" Dr. Gogue, President and Chancellor of the University of Houston, posed this question in his state of the university address Friday morning. This was his segue into a discussion of UH's master plan for the main campus. UH's enrollment is expected to increase to at least 45,000 over the next ten years, but the school has a greater space deficit than any university......

SustainLane, a web resource for making choices about personal health, home, and city sustainability, has published this year's City Rankings, which measure the quality-of-life and economic factors of the U.S.'s fifty largest cities. There are fifteen categories ranging from air quality to housing affordability, and four possible rankings in each category: sustainability leader, moving to sustainability, mixed sustainability progress, sustainability at risk, and the melancholy sustainability laggard. Surprisingly, Houston ranked best on metro transit, city......

There's nothing like a story about declining wages for a midweek pick-me-up, is there? In that spirit, Houstonist brings you the news that, though Texas has had more job growth than the national average in the last few years, our median income is dropping. In fact, there's been a 6.2 percent drop in the median wage in Texas since 2002, and young and black workers are being hit particularly hard. The information comes from the......

If you're reading Houstonist at the office today, we salute you: We're sure as heck not at work, having already tapped into our supply of Sam Adams and historic documents in preparation for tomorrow. And according to the AP, we're not alone: A lot of Americans are taking today off, officially or not. The problem, of course, is that July 4 falls on Tuesday this year. Though that technically means today isn't a holiday, it's......

We remember our first job, working at a suburban Houston mall. We proudly negotiated the hourly rate up to $5.00 an hour, contingent on us doing a good job for the first month, during which we would make a whopping $4.75 and hour. Soon after, in 1997, the federal minimum wage was raised to $5.15. Apparently that’s a number the federal government has felt good about, because the minimum wage hasn’t been raised since. (If......

It looks like Houston will escape the housing market-bust that many other metropolitan areas will experience, says University of Houston economist Barton Smith. He spoke about the uniqueness of our market yesterday to over 1,000 people at a real estate program. The downside of the good news is that our good housing market has to do with higher energy prices, since Houston is a mecca for energy companies. “This won't produce a '70s boom......

Remember how Taqueria Arandas was going to participate in today's immigration boycott by closing all its restaurants? Yeah, well, there's been a change of heart: The chain said Sunday it'll stay open after all. Last week Taquerias Aranadas franchise President Judy Camarena said it would close its 41 bakeries and restaurants Monday after a vote. But Sunday, the company sent a letter saying while they continue to support human rights and the rights of employees......

As expected, former Enron Chairman Ken Lay blamed others for his company's downfall on Monday, his first day of testimony in his and ex-Enron CEO Jeff Skilling's trial. Lay said theft by former CFO Andy Fastow, a conspiracy of short sellers and The Wall Street Journal combined to create a "run on the bank" that ruined what was the country's seventh-largest company in 2001 — and then he pulled a classic "I'm responsible, but not......

If the Petroleum Club is any indication, things in the oil business aren't so bad: This weekend, several hundred people helped celebrate the club's 60th birthday at a lavish $100,000 party. But below the surface is evidence of how far the august club — and Houston's economy — have come since the heady days of the oil boom. The club was founded in 1946 in part to give its members a place to go for......

This post comes to us from Austinist's Shannon Roberts. In the last month, we started a discussion about the potentially critically-damaging impact that the dissolution or restructuring of the Texas Commission on the Arts (TCA) could have on Texas' arts and cultural organizations. (here and here) This week, we interviewed Ricardo Hernandez, the Executive Director of the Texas Commission on the Arts, and Jennifer Wijangco, the Deputy Director of the Texas Cultural Trust to get......

Former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling began the rather tough task of convincing the jurors that he's just like you and me — er, like them — during his first day of testimony in his and ex-Enron Chairman Ken Lay's trial yesterday. Skilling, you'll remember, was known for the grace and charm with which he treated people during his days at the Big E (there was that infamous conference call during which Skilling called an analyst......

Tim Westergren wants to introduce you to great music. In early 2000, he founded The Music Genome Project. In 2005, Westergren introduced his mission to the Internet, beginning Pandora, Web radio that utilizes a listener's favorite bands or songs to find similar music based on the components of the song — melody, lyrics, instruments, etc. Westergren hails from the Bay area, is thorough in everything he does and recently embarked on a journey across the......