Tommy's Wine Bar to become NOSH, a "social house" in the Warehouse District
Last summer, a New Orleans restaurant group added three Warehouse District properties in one fell swoop, buying Tommy’s Cuisine, the attached Tommy’s Wine Bar and, just across the street, Tomas Bistro and its large event space.
Today that company detailed plans to transform Tommy’s Wine Bar into a new lounge called NOSH, or New Orleans Social House.
Creole Cuisine Restaurant Concepts, the local company behind this and many other new restaurant developments around town, plans to open NOSH by late April. Renovations to remake the former wine bar at the corner of Tchoupitoulas and Julia streets are underway.
“This area has seen so much change, it’s becoming a social mecca, the energy is very strong,” said Creole Cuisine Restaurant Concepts CEO Marv Ammari. “We’re not trying to duplicate anyone here, what we want to do is add something different that we think is needed.”
NOSH will have live music every night and serve a menu of small plates, including raw oysters and an array of chilled seafood dishes. Lobster tacos, beef carpaccio, flatbreads, bison sliders and salads are all part of the opening menu for NOSH.
The new lounge will also have a membership program, giving those who sign up perks like free parking, discounts at the bar and invites to private events, such as weekly beer dinners and spirits dinners, devised along the lines of wine dinners.
NOSH opens with a few familiar names at the helm. The bar manager is Jay Teichmann, a longtime bartender at Houston’s in Metairie, which hada devoted local followingbefore closing in 2015. The kitchen will be led by Michael Farrell, a chef who gained a following in New Orleans at Le Meritage,a wine-themed restaurantwith inventive flavors within the Maison Dupuy Hotel. He was chef at that now-closed French Quarter restaurant from its debut in 2008 until 2012.
Ammari described the idea for NOSH as providing “a social gathering place, somewhere you go right after work or before dinner or to go somewhere after a Friday lunch.”
Like its predecessor, NOSH will connect through a doorway to Tommy’s Cuisine, the adjacent Creole-Italian restaurant.
The wine bar and its related businesses were created by Tommy Andrade, a seasoned veteran of the local hospitality business who has continued to work with Creole Cuisine Restaurant Concepts since selling his properties last summer.
Creole Cuisine Restaurant Concepts is the same company that has in recent years acquired Broussard’s Restaurant, Café Maspero and the Bombay Club while launching its own new concepts, including Kingfish in the French Quarter and the Boulevard, in the former Metairie location of Houston’s.
Most recently, the company announced plansto convert the former Barreca’s Restaurant on Metairie Road to a Royal House Oyster Bar, an expansion of its French Quarter seafood restaurant. At the same time, the company revealed plans to open a new, yet-to-be-named restaurant in the Bywater, in the former home of Maurepas Foods.http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/entertainment_life/food_restaurants/article_e1cdae80-155a-11e7-83a4-0ff321c0a6fa.html