Owner shares name, plans for new Cajun/seafood restaurant he’s opening on the west side
As I reported back in September, the Todd Brian’s Brick Street Café & Tavern in Old Town Square that Wichita has known since 2012 is undergoing a total transformation — complete with a new address, a new name and a new approach.
Now, owner Chris Tincher is sharing a few more details about his plans than he was ready to a couple of months ago.
He said then that he intended to close his 12-year-old restaurant in Old Town Square — and he did during the first week of October. Since then, he’s been gutting and remodeling the restaurant’s future home, which is the space at the Tyler Pointe development at 13th and Tyler that Hurricane Sports Grill occupied until it closed in late October.
Since then, Tincher has been posting on Todd Brian’s social media pages videos of the work he’s doing inside the restaurant. But he hadn’t yet disclosed the new name he’d chosen or talked much about his vision for the re-imagined business.
This week, though, he shared that when the restaurant reopens at 13th and Tyler — hopefully in late February — it’ll be called Todd’s Creole Kitchen.
Though Tincher insists this won’t be a new restaurant — just a re-branding of the original business — the name won’t be the only thing that changes. Though he plans to keep several of the Cajun favorites he served at Todd Brian’s, the menu now will focus on American and Cajun fare as well as seafood.
The restaurant will have a “sexy” vibe, he said, and it will even serve things like blue point oysters.
He said he’d be “taking what we did well and adding to that” and that the new restaurant will have a much different feel.
“It’s a blending of the old concept with many new ideas and twists,” he said.
One of the videos that Tincher shared showed the interior of the old Hurricane space completely emptied out and stripped down. He explained where he was planning to put a bank of elevated booths along the east wall and told his viewers that he intended to update the bar and take down the multiple television sets that were left behind.
“It was a sports bar before,” he said. “It’s definitely not going to be a sports bar now.”
Hurricane Sports Grill, part of a Florida-based chain, first opened in late 2017, and Emerson Biggin’s Old Town owner Luis Lopez took it over in 2019. He said in October that his lease was up and that his landlords were raising his rent, so he decided to close.
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