Championship home
Our list of real estate transfers this week includes a house purchase by Jermain Taylor, the world middleweight boxing champion. He’s moving on up.
County records show he and his wife Erica have bought a house at 1 Vintage Drive, North Little Rock, from Cindy K. Childers and Mona McClelland for $1.65 million.
New man at the grill
Chef Patrick Herron, now in the kitchen at Pleasant Valley Country Club, is selling his Beechwood Grill on Kavanaugh in Hillcrest and it sounds like a buyer has been found.
David Bennett, a graduate of the Scottsdale Culinary Institute who currently is a chef at Lily’s Dim Sum and Then Some and whose past credits include Trio’s downtown, has struck a tentative deal to buy the restaurant. He’ll be joined in the purchase by his father, heart doctor Anthony Bennett.
No immediate changes in name or menu or the adjoining Afterthought Lounge are planned if the deal proceeds. There are existing Christmas season obligations to honor. But the restaurant likely would close briefly after the first of the year for some refurbishing and menu editing that will produce offerings the chef’s mother, Linda Bennett, characterizes as “rustic gourmet.”
Gone but not forgotten
Jennings Osborne — he of the Christmas lights, charity barbecues, etc. — responds to an in item in The Observer last week that noted his light display saying “God Bless America and George Bush” had gone dark.
Vandals kept cutting the wires, Osborne said. “We were running out of places to splice,” he said. Plus, Osborne said the lights were in front of one of two houses that he owns on either side of his main house on Cantrell Road. He’s building a new facility at a country place on Kanis Road for all the barbecue and light gear he now stores at the side houses. .
But see no political motivation in the darkening of the display. “George is still one of my heroes,” Osborne said.
El Latino
Pedro Berumen, owner of Jose’s Night Club Latino, has asked the state Alcoholic Beverage Control for permission to transfer his private club permit from Geyer Springs Road to 308 Broadway. If he makes it, it would be the first Latino night club downtown.
Don’t get your mouth set for a few downtown cervezas just yet, however. Margie Ruple of the ABC notes that Berumen has applied to move the permit at least twice unsuccessfully.