When Café Louie opened in Second Ward in May 2022, it was quickly heralded by Houstonians as one of the city’s best new restaurants. By May 2023, it had permanently shut its doors. Houston has long been a city of boom and bust, and while good restaurants close here every day, it’s rare for one so lauded to shutter so quickly.

Angelo and Lucianna “Louie” Emiliani, the sibling duo behind the cafe, are still trying to make sense of how things ended. “I ran a good deal of restaurants before this one, but this was my first that I owned,” Angelo says. “My general feeling now is that there’s a lot more luck involved than I thought.”

A handful of name and concept changes later, the siblings have officially handed the keys of 3401 Harrisburg Boulevard to the owners of Street to Kitchen and are now trying to secure a new space to recapture that initial magic.

For the past several months, the siblings have been on the hunt for a new spot that can house side-by-side concepts. Their plan is to have Angie’s Pizza, Angelo’s famous pop-up, on one side, and have a combined bakery and bar ran by Louie on the other side, both with their own signage and separate entrances. Although the goal is to have the restaurants next door to each other, their hope is that they can find a spot that is connected through a shared inner door so customers can easily move between both spots.

A long road

When Café Louie first burst onto the scene in 2022, it pitched itself as a breakfast, brunch, and lunch spot, one of few in the corner of Second Ward that it called home. Diners flocked to the restaurant for Angelo’s food and Louie’s top-notch pastries. Angelo cut his teeth running kitchens for James Beard Award–winning Arizona chef Chris Bianco and came to fame locally through his Angie’s Pizza pop-up. For the first month or two, Angelo says Café Louie was doing “gangbuster” business, with over 300 covers a day.

“We were killing it, but then it tapered off,” he says. “That’s just natural. It’s going to happen with restaurants. We didn’t expect to keep that kind of pace.”

What didn’t taper off, however, was the buzz about Café Louie in the local foodie sphere, but this influence has its limits, and the continued enthusiasm for the restaurant wasn’t enough to keep seats actually filled. Angelo thinks a large part of the problem is that there just isn’t enough daytime traffic in that part of the neighborhood. Café Louie was located in a jewel box–like space in The Plant, a mixed-use development in Second Ward whose owners have some pretty lofty goals for that portion of the neighborhood. While the development is well hyped, in Café Louie’s case, that hype didn’t translate into bodies through its doors outside of weekends.

“It’s the Second Ward in the East End, and frankly there’s just not a lot of people who were going to be able to come to eat breakfast on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or even a Friday,” Angelo says. “What we kind of realized is that we just didn’t have the density required for a business like that.”

Breakfast or brunch restaurants tend to run a lower price per average customer. Angelo says the average at Café Louie was around $20 a person. That lower price point meant Café Louie needed a steady supply of customers in order to not lose money. When that supply started to dry up, the Emiliani siblings turned to dinner service, which usually demands a higher price point. Their hope was that dinner would be enough to offset their losses from breakfast. That didn’t pan out.

“Dinner was going to be our answer, our way to become Nancy’s Hustle in a way, but it just never caught on. I never understood it,” Angelo says, referencing the trendy and constantly busy East Downtown spot. “I was actually really happy with our dinner menu. It was my favorite menu we had. We had food writers and chefs and everyone come in all the time, and they were all super excited about it, but it just never caught on.”

Since the restaurant had “café” in its name, people came in expecting to order a sandwich and a coffee at 7 p.m. To fix their branding issue, the Emilianis decided seven months in to lose the Café Louie name entirely and shift the restaurant to a dinner-only spot. When the restaurant was relaunched as Louie’s Italian American in December 2022, it once again garnered rave reviews from local food critics, but that wasn’t enough. By April 2023, the restaurant had shuttered.

“Day to day we had a good crowd, but realistically, it needed to be about 30 percent more,” Angelo says. “It just didn’t work. It wasn’t there, so we decided we were going to switch again to a pizzeria. And then we just decided that we weren’t going to do that either.”

Recouping

In the time since the restaurant closed for good, the Emilianis have been doing a lot of reflecting. “While Café Louie was an immensely painful process for Louie and I, it’s probably the most valuable learning experience we’ll ever have,” Angelo says.

He is undefeated, however, and he’s spent his time helping friends start their own projects—he helped a former Café Louie partner rebrand How to Survive on Land and Sea as Neighbors Pizza Bar, which serves his pizza—and he’s gone back to work as a consultant for his longtime mentor Bianco.

All the while, the Emiliani siblings have been hard at work behind the scenes planning their big comeback. On October 20, they posted a photo of a croissant on Instagram with the caption: “Good news. Soon.” The feed was wiped of previous posts and the account now dons a new name, Little Louie’s.