A new restaurant in Wichita’s Old Town district will focus on whiskey and Asian fare
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Her dreams of opening a quick-service Asian restaurant — and launching it into a franchise — are on hold for now.
But Pauleen Riel, with the help of her husband Jeremy Schmidt, has moved on to a “Plan B” that will bring a new Cambodian-style Cajun restaurant and whiskey bar to Old Town Wichita.
Riel and Schmidt hope to have Headz & Tailz Whisky Bar open by March 1 in the space at 301 N. Washington that Fredo’s vacated at the end of December. (The couple is intentionally spelling “whiskey” without the e.)
The restaurant will serve Cambodian-style Cajun dishes, which Riel calls “Khmer-Cajun,” and will also have a full bar focused on whiskey and other mixed drinks. She’ll open the restaurant’s large patio for live music, dancing and cigar smoking.
Although she’ll have her egg rolls on the menu, the specialty will be stir-fry dishes made with her signature sauce plus seafood like crab, lobster and mussels, along with other meats.
Her road to opening the new restaurant has been long and taken several unexpected turns, Riel said. She started the business, which she called Happy Eggroll, as a delivery-only operation at the start of the pandemic but always intended to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant. She announced over the summer that she’d signed a lease and would open a Panda Express-style restaurant specializing in egg rolls and banh mi sandwiches.
The lease was at Tyler Pointe, the newer strip center at 13th and Tyler owned by Occidental Management, and the plan was to take over a space next to Uno Mas on the strip center’s west-facing side. But the deal ultimately fell through, Riel said, and she got a “better offer” to open in Old Town.
She realized, though, that the new space would be more conducive to a different type of business, one with a bar and a Cambodian menu that she’d hoped to open in the future. Suddenly, she said, Plan B became Plan A, though she still hopes to open her Happy Eggroll business in the future.
The menu at Headz & Tailz will include soup and curry dishes, beef stew, braised pork and stir fries. In addition to whiskey, its full bar will include drinks like jack fruit margaritas and Bloody Marys.
Headz & Tailz will be a full-service restaurant, Riel said, and she’s currently looking to hire servers and bartenders.
I’ll let you know when the restaurant is ready to open, but in the meantime, you can follow along on its Facebook page.
This story was originally published January 11, 2021 at 11:56 AM.
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