The downstairs red umbrellas belong to Joey, which is yet another boring chain restaurant, one which seems to be present at basically every major mall. It's too bad there isn't a local spot in this prime location, right next to the mall's main entrance!
Huh, I can't say I've ever heard of Joey. Upon further research, it seems they are a chain from British Columbia with some locations in the US, all on the west coast except for one in, yep, The Galleria in Houston! Even still, like I said earlier, I've never heard of them! Wikipedia says they focus on Asian, American, and Mediterranean food. To me, that sounds like they don't focus on anything!
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of British Columbia and malls, I made a very odd discovery today. We have a dead mall in my general part of Houston, Northwest Mall. By dead, I mean it is completely dead. It closed around 2018 or so and the Foley's/Macy's anchor closed after Hurricane Ike damaged it in 2008. NW Mall has a twin mall in Southeast Houston, Almeda Mall, which is still around, but the Macy's closed earlier this year and that puts the future of the mall itself in doubt.
Anyway, given how often I shopped at Northwest Mall over the years, I never looked up the grand opening ad for the Foley's there from 1967 in the newspaper archives. I found it today. To my shock, Foley's gave the store a Northwest theme when it opened. No, not Northwest Houston, the Pacific Northwest! Specifically, British Columbia. The logo for the store had a Mountie on it, the in-store restaurant had a Northwest-themed (mostly seafood) menu, and they were giving away Continental Airlines flights to Vancouver at the grand opening (at the time, Continental wouldn't have had any thing special in Houston as they weren't based here yet and they didn't have a hub here...IAH was still a couple of years away from opening and even then Continental didn't have much here until the 1980s). Furthermore, they had Canadian government officials at the grand opening and British Columbia had sent over a Canadian log and a historic saw blade over to be used at the grand opening ribbon cutting...or log cutting as it might have been, lol.
I don't know when Foley's dropped the Pacific Northwest theme at that store. I'm guessing it was pretty quickly because I certainly never saw anything Canadian or Pacific Northwest in the store. The notion of a British Columbia-themed major department store here is, well, odd. It is about as odd as a Texas-themed department store in the Pacific Northwest, but then again, who knows! I never would have predicted what I read today about the Northwest Mall Foley's, lol.
Ah, them being from BC explains why they seem to be in all the major malls around here, since "around here" on this blog tends to mean the Seattle and Vancouver areas!
DeleteHuh, that's quite strange! I've seen northwest-themed department and grocery stores of that era before... but they've all been up here, in the actual northwest. Honestly, a Texas-themed store in another part of the country would make more sense than a northwest-themed store in Texas, since Texas does have a fairly well-known, distinctive identity.