"Finally opening a location in Beaumont feels like coming home," Brooks Bassler told CultureMap when he confirmed his Cajun seafood chain, BB's Tex-Orleans, was moving into 2325 Calder Avenue. His grandmother, the "Maw Maw" behind the recipes, was born in Winnie. For a Houston restaurateur, that's a Golden Triangle pedigree.
Before BB's signed the lease, the same spot in Old Town housed Easy's, Luke's, and most recently The Park. Three miles away, downtown Crockett Street offers another restaurant setting, with Riverside Grille and Hearsay Gastro Lounge in restored historic buildings. The two areas show different approaches to restaurant spaces in Beaumont. If you're deciding where to eat this month, both are worth considering; they offer different kinds of nights out.
BB's Tex-Orleans on Calder Avenue
Brooks Bassler started BB's in 2007 with a 1,100-square-foot spot at Montrose and Westheimer in Houston. Almost two decades and eleven locations later, the Beaumont build-out at 2325 Calder Avenue is nothing like that first shop. The new location spans roughly 8,200 square feet, with 3,200 square feet of indoor dining seating 70 people and a 5,000-square-foot patio that seats up to 175, complete with a covered section, a kids' play area, and a 225-inch outdoor screen for game days.
That scale is central to BB's approach. The independent restaurants that previously occupied 2325 Calder each brought their own concepts to the property. BB's brings a format developed across eleven other Texas locations to the same site. The menu leans on Leidenheimer French bread po'boys, including the Bedtime in the Bayou fried shrimp version and a South Texas Fire Po'boy loaded with marinated skirt steak, pepper jack, and a spicy pepper cheese sauce. Build-your-own boils come with Prasek's smoked garlic sausage and alligator andouille, and the gumbo is still called Maw Maw's. The restaurant opened in early April 2026 and, per the founder, only closes three days a year: Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day.
"So many of our recipes are inspired by Maw Maw's cooking, but even more than the great food, it's a way of living: family, hard work, fairness," Bassler told CultureMap.
That's the pitch. BB's brings a model backed by its other locations to the Calder Avenue site, offering a different approach from the independent restaurants that were there before.
Downtown Crockett Street, a Different Bet
Riverside Grille didn't need a proven format. Owners Allen Perkins and Jay Jenkinson bet on a single restored building at 290 Crockett Street, in the district that shares the street's name, and built a casual fine-dining menu around it instead of trying to replicate something that already worked elsewhere. The space blends historic bones with a more polished interior, and the food follows the same instinct: Redfish Pontchartrain topped with sautéed shrimp, crab meat, and mushrooms in a brown butter wine sauce, a Cajun-spiced Naked Redfish with scampi butter, and a Bang Bang Shrimp appetizer with Asian slaw that shows up on the menu cover for a reason. Riverside Grille currently sits at a 4.8 rating on Tripadvisor and ranks 21st out of 185 restaurants in Beaumont, a respectable slot in a city with that much competition for a table.
The difference between this and the Calder approach isn't quality. It's structure. BB's uses a format across multiple locations. Riverside Grille builds its concept around one restored building on one street that locals already associate with a night out.
The Building That Used to Be Suga's
Hearsay Gastro Lounge tells the same downtown story from a different angle. It opened January 15, 2025, in a restored building that previously housed Suga's Deep South Cuisine, and the pairing of a historic shell with a new concept is becoming the signature move for this stretch of downtown. The menu runs eclectic American, with Bacon-Wrapped Shrimp and a Wagyu Beef Burger among the dishes that get repeat mentions, served against a backdrop of antique décor updated for a modern crowd.
What Crockett Street and the surrounding downtown blocks are doing, one building at a time, is proving that Beaumont's older architecture doesn't need to be torn down to support a new restaurant scene. It needs an owner willing to put in the renovation work. That's a slower, more expensive path than leasing a turnkey space like the one on Calder, but it's the path that's currently filling in downtown's restaurant map building by building.
What Anchors a Weekend Now
None of this happens in isolation from the rest of downtown. The Jefferson Theatre, run through the city's Beaumont Events program, has kept a steady run of movie nights and touring shows on the calendar this year, and the Beaumont Civic Center and Julie Rogers Theatre round out the same walkable stretch. The Art Studio and the Beaumont Art League have been hosting life drawing sessions and gallery nights through Old Town all summer, running into September. And if you're planning further out, Beaumont Oktoberfest lands at Rogers Park Community Center on October 10, one more reason a fall weekend downtown doesn't have to start and end with dinner.
Put a meal at any of these three restaurants next to one of those events and you've got an evening that doesn't require leaving the city. That's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that adds up to a place feeling more finished than it did a year ago.
Two Bets, One Better-Fed City
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only look at one restaurant at a time. Beaumont has two kinds of restaurant development underway, in parallel, three miles apart. Old Town has BB's Tex-Orleans, which brings an established format to the area. Downtown has independent restaurants in renovated historic buildings. Both are part of Beaumont's restaurant scene, and neither one is the whole story on its own. That's why it's worth knowing both are happening at the same time.
If you've lived here a while, you probably remember when that Calder Avenue building was something else entirely, maybe more than once. Following BB's new location, alongside Crockett Street's restored buildings and restaurants, is one way to track how this city is changing this year.
I grew up in Southeast Texas and I still eat at these places on the same nights my clients ask me about them, so if you're ever curious what's actually good right now, or you're thinking further down the road about buying, selling, or just understanding a neighborhood before you commit to it, Beth Westbrook is easy to find and easy to talk to. Let's Connect.
