3 restaurants created by Fort Worth chef Tim Love have closed in Texas
Three Houston restaurants — Woodshed Smokehouse, Love Shack burgers and Side Dough — closed after service on Aug. 26, 2022.
Each restaurant was created by Fort Worth chef Tim Love, then licensed to a Houston operator.
Woodshed Smokehouse and Love Shack originated in Fort Worth and remain open there today. Side Dough was a double-decker bus selling pastries and coffee. A similarly-named Love concept, Back Dough, remains open in Denton.
Love didn’t respond to an interview request, but a statement says that the licensing agreement expired on all three restaurants. CultureMap spotted the closures first.
All three of Love’s Houston restaurants opened March 12, 2020 — less than a week before dining rooms shut down in an effort to combat the coronavirus. The Dallas Morning News interviewed Love that week, and he called it “a genuine armageddon moment for this industry.”
“I’m in the worst position I could ever be in,” he said at the time, just five days into opening three new spots in Houston.
With the closures, Love does not have any restaurants in the Houston area.
A majority of his restaurants are in his home town of Fort Worth, but he’s also expanded to Denton, Austin and Knoxville, Tenn. Love’s first restaurant, and still one of his best-known, is a high-end eatery called Lonesome Dove in the Fort Worth Stockyards that sells wild game. He now has several restaurants in that neighborhood, including a taco bar called Paloma Suerte, a no-cell-phones-allowed Italian restaurant called Caterina’s, and a coming-soon music venue and saloon called Tannahill’s.