A new Cajun seafood restaurant opens in Old Town this weekend. Here’s what’s on the menu
A new Cajun restaurant will open its doors in Old Town on Friday, but this one will be a bit different from what Wichita has seen before.
Pauleen Riel and her husband, Jeremy Schmidt, are ready to launch their new Headz & Tailz, which will open at 4 p.m. Friday in the space at 301 N. Washington that Fredos vacated at the end of December.
The full-service restaurant will serve lots of seafood and Cajun dishes prepared with an Asian flair. This type of fusion is commonly called Viet-Cajun, but since Riel is Cambodian and not Vietnamese, she calls her type of cooking “Khmer-Cajun,” and she serves many of her dishes with her famous “Riel Sauce.”
The new restaurant will also have a full bar that will offer tropical cocktails, margaritas and mojitos as well as alcoholic “grown-up smoothies” and boba drinks.
Riel and Schmidt say they will also take advantage of the screened-in patio on the front of the building and will offer outdoor seating along with live music, which they’ll likely launch next week.
This week, I got a sneak peek inside the restaurant, where the new owners have been working on a small remodel that includes the addition of a bright red sign outside and freshly repainted walls inside.
The menu features Riel’s signature egg rolls, which she started selling via delivery at the start of the pandemic, as well as appetizers like lettuce wraps, Cambodian beef sticks and crab Rangoon. There are also several salads, including a papaya salad and a beef salad made with sirloin, cucumbers, mint, lettuce and house sauce.
Entree choices include things like gumbo, chicken curry, hot pot, Korean short ribs, braised pork stew, and pork crepes. Entrees featuring ginger Dungeness crab and spicy lobster are also available, and a list of seafood offerings includes crawfish, shrimp, mussels, clams, crab legs, oysters and lobster sold by the pound. Riel said she’s particularly excited about her dramatic “Dirty Platter,” a huge tray of crawfish, shrimp, clams, mussels, lobster and Dungeness crab meant to feed a crowd.
A separate lunch menu offers things like fried rice, chow mein, lemongrass chicken, and other soups and noodle dishes.
Headz & Tailz will be open from 4 to 9 p.m. on Friday, then it will start its regular hours of 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily except Mondays. Riel said she may add some later weekend hours in the near future.
Headz & Taliz has been more than a year in the making, Riel said. She first started her business as a delivery-only service she called Happy Eggroll, but she said she 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 Old Town space would be more conducive to a restaurant that had a bar and offered a Cambodian-style menu.
For more information about Headz & Tailz, call 316-364-4151.
Another crawfish update
As I reported in November, Viet-Cajun restaurant Mama Nith’s at 604 N. Topeka — which owner Nith Huynh opened in late 2017 but shut down during the pandemic — is looking for a new space to reopen.
In the meantime, she’s offering seafood boils to go. From 3 to 7 p.m. on Saturday, she’s selling boils for pick-up only that include choice of crawfish, shrimp, clams, mussels and add-ons like corn, potatoes and sausage. People must pre-order by messaging Mama Nith’s though its Facebook page.
This story was originally published March 10, 2021 at 1:14 PM.
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