Love’s Style

It’s a brisk late afternoon in mid-January, and the happy hour crowd is gathering at Ático, the new rooftop bar atop the SpringHill Suites hotel in the Fort Worth Stockyards. Word is getting out on chef Tim Love’s latest, a Barcelona-inspired bar with cocktails like Blood Orange Sangria and whose all-shareable plates are a Love-style fusion of Spanish tapas and Texas. The customers are a mélange as colorful as the sunset that’s begun pouring onto Ático’s outdoor deck, which offers expansive views of downtown to the south and the Stockyards to the east and north. A Stock Show group crowds into one of the vignettes inside the bar and eyes the full lounges outside. Three Brits living in Fort Worth move in to claim an outdoor spot as another group gets ready to leave.

It’s exactly what Love wants, and, as he typically does, he’s hanging out inconspicuously inside the bar, watching the scenes unfold. “Everybody’s picking, everybody’s sharing,” he says later during an interview. “It’s a really unique space. The vibe is really good.”

It’s been a tough year for Love, whose wife, Emilie, who helped run the couple’s restaurants, including the Lonesome Dove Western Bistro, Love Shack, and Woodshed Smokehouse, was struck by a van outside the Nashville, Tennessee, airport last February and is still recovering from her wounds. Love kept a commitment a few weeks later to help anchor Fort Worth’s visitor “house” at the gigantic South by Southwest festival in Austin, where he mixed take-home spices with long lines of patrons and catered a taco lunch. Later in the spring, he opened Gemelle, an Italian restaurant in West Fort Worth, named after the couple’s twin daughters, to uneven reviews. “The place was a zoo,” Love says. “We were a little unprepared. There’s no other way to state that. The place is running really well now.”

Being away from the business to help care for his wife and their children exposed holes in management, Love says, which prompted him to re-examine management and the company’s values heading into a round of aggressive growth he expects could double the size of the company by next year. Besides the Fort Worth openings, in March, he’s expected to open a pair of long-awaited restaurants — Woodshed and Love Shack — in Houston’s Levy Park. This year, he’s also expanding a catering deal he has with the Live Nation concert promoter and a consulting arrangement with a chain of truck stops.

To get ready, within the last year, Love installed a number of new senior executives, made his restaurant general managers more accountable for their results, and implemented a first-ever set of core values focused on drivers like humility, hospitality, love and commitment. The company, which did $25 million in 2019 sales, should be doing $40 million – $45 million by March next year, and the employee count should move to more than 500 from 300, Love says.

“I was blurring a lot of lines,” says Love, adding he’s always needed “checks and balances” to offset his aggressive streak. “We had people hit the ceiling. They had their hearts in the company but weren’t capable of going where we needed to go. We had GMs in the stores who weren’t acting as GMs. Now we’re making them more accountable.”

Asked what the management flow looks like now, Love, in the interview at his headquarters on North Main Street, north of downtown, says, “I have it in my pocket.” He removes a piece of paper from his back pocket and unfolds it, showing a multitiered accountability chart that includes newly hired vice presidents of culinary, beverage and catering off-site events, an HR director, payroll director, and, most recently, a chief operating officer, a Houstonian moving from New York who started in February. He has financial background, so Love says he doesn’t have to hire a CFO now. The chart keeps the company chef-driven, its bedrock, Love says.

“We’ve operated very, very lean for years,” he says. “I didn’t want to lose my creativity. Full disclosure, I was chasing a lot. I was also looking for quality of life. I work a lot.” He thinks the company was running according to its new core values. “But I think other people couldn’t see it.”

It’s been 20 years since the 49-year-old Love — who was born in Denton, earned a degree in finance and marketing from the University of Tennessee, worked in a Knoxville restaurant kitchen to make money, and moved to Colorado where he worked as a chef in upscale restaurants — opened his Lonesome Dove Western Bistro in the Fort Worth Stockyards. It’s the platform from which Love has generated the cash to launch his other restaurants. He also has Lonesome Doves in Austin and Knoxville; White Elephant Saloon in the Stockyards; and Queenie’s Steakhouse in Denton, named after his mother. He took on investors to open the Austin restaurant and has taken on debt to open the Houston restaurants, Love says. “Everything else is built from the 50 seats at Lonesome Dove,” he says. “That’s where it started.”

Love gets inquiries often about partnerships. “I think I operate better” alone, he says. “I’m a big risk taker. I don’t mind the burden of the risk. I really go from the hip a lot. I don’t want to frustrate people.”

Love recounts a story of a speech he gave a few years ago at the University of North Texas. Asked to focus on accomplishments, he instead gave a talk on what he views as his three biggest mistakes: opening a restaurant called Duce in west Fort Worth in 2006, opening a Lonesome Dove at the same time in New York City, and being unprepared to handle the Colonial Invitational, the PGA Tour’s annual stop in Fort Worth.

Love later sold Duce. “That was probably the worst restaurant I ever had,” he says. “That was when I wasn’t very smart.” With Lonesome Dove going in Manhattan’s Chelsea district, “I couldn’t spend enough time in Fort Worth.” Love closed Lonesome Dove after several months and a bad review by a New York Times restaurant critic, who criticized the excessive rubs and decor, referred to the kangaroo on the menu as “marsupial nachos,” and called the restaurant a “Western drifter.” Love’s one year of serving as the Colonial’s on-course concessionaire was marked by long lines and product shortages. “It was a big undertaking,” Love says. “I accept responsibility. I got caught up in how good it was going to be.”

Still, the New York restaurant elevated Love, who also counts it today as one of his best moves. Love subsequently appeared on the Food Network’s “Iron Chef America” in 2007, where he defeated the famed Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto, diving into the “secret ingredient” of chiles, pounding down shots with his sous-chefs, and wowing the judges with originality.

“There was a lot of street cred that came with that,” says Love, who met the publicist he has today through the New York restaurant, signed a deal to be a national spokesman for Hellmann’s Mayonnaise, and co-founded the Austin Food + Wine Festival in 2012. “It was tough on my ego, but it was probably the best career move I’ve ever made.”

The idea for Ático came from Love’s travels to Spain and his love of tapas. In Barcelona, he found inspiration in two bars – Cal Pep Restaurant and Bar Canete. “I’ve always wanted to have a Spanish bar,” he says. “I’ve got 250 ideas I think are really great. They’re not all really great. I just think they’re really great.”

The developer of the hotel bearing the SpringHill Suites brand contacted Love about a rooftop establishment, and Love was on board before the developer signed on with SpringHill, a Marriott limited service nameplate with modern conference space and well-appointed lounges. “Honestly, I was a little nervous about it,” Love says when the developer closed the deal with SpringHill. “Is that really going to be on brand for me? But it’s like a Marriott Marquis.”

Love also had wondered whether a tapas bar would work in his nearby Lonesome Dove. “I don’t think it has the same chance,” he says. “There’s not enough uniqueness to get people to come in. Now, once I’ve got them in the door, I’ve got them. But we needed other things.”

Love’s deal with the developer includes being able to cater the meeting space, which can seat up to 190 for dinner and have influence over the design flourishes in the hotel’s common spaces to make them consistent with those of Ático. “Once we decided what we wanted to do with the rooftop, we kind of bled that all the way through the hotel.”

For Ático, Love knew he wanted to create an unusual experience. “We all know steak, Mexican food, and barbecue is what sells in Fort Worth, Texas,” he says. “But the space is so unique, in itself, you hate to make it burgers and beer.”

Love also knew he wanted to focus on being a bar, not a restaurant. “We didn’t want to open a restaurant,” he says. “We wanted to open a bar with really good food. If I make it a restaurant, it creates a completely different set of expectations.”

That’s even more so, given the tapas orientation, he says. Most of his patrons haven’t been to Spain, he surmises, and haven’t experienced tapas. “It doesn’t compute. That’s why I was so emphatic that it be a bar.”

Servers offer a complimentary sample daily cocktail in a shot glass. The menu ranges from the familiar — venison salami and flatbread, charcuterie, smoked hummus, sliced steak — to dishes like sardines. “We probably won’t sell a lot of those,” Love says of the sardines, “but the people who love sardines will go, ‘Holy crap.’” And to finish the snacking off, servers bring by small vases with cotton stems and bolls. Only, the catch is the bolls are really complimentary cotton candy. “All these sensory things,” Love says.

Next up, Love expects a mid-March opening of three concepts in Houston’s Levy Park, which features a pavilion, playground, dog park, event lawn and community gardens: Woodshed, Love Shack and Side Dough, which will serve up coffee, beer, grab-and-go pastries and other items out of a double-decker bus. The Levy Park project has been long held up, first by Hurricane Harvey and also by local design requirements that forced a redesign. “All these things held us up two years,” Love says and then jokes: “We’re finished with that. We’re only talking about positive things now.”

Love opened his first Love Shack in 2007, serving up burgers and beer in the Stockyards. He subsequently opened another one in the city’s West 7th Street corridor, but Love closed that one in a dispute with the landlord. He moved it to TCU’s Bluebonnet Circle but ended up closing it due to an unwieldly partnership. “There were too many hands,” he says. Love has another Love Shack he opened at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport’s Terminal E. “Love Shack is a very successful concept,” he says. “We had two unfortunate incidents.”

Love expects Levy Park, in the heart of Houston’s Upper Kirby, to be a hit. “It reminds me of New York, just lots of activity all the time,” he says. “It’s just a very nice urban park, very safe.” 

This spring, Love is putting in more finishing details in Gemelle, in a lush space on White Settlement Road just off the Trinity River and 500 yards from where Love and his family live. “I love that space,” he says. “I’ve always thought the White Settlement corridor should be the South Congress of Fort Worth.” He worries the burgeoning redevelopment of the property on White Settlement in the nearby River District could rob the area of some of its character. “You can’t have all-new,” he says. “It’s unique, and it’s old.”

And beyond that? Love likes naming his places after people in his life. When might we see a place named Emilie or one named after his son? “There’s a lot of stuff in the works,” he says, not elaborating. “You may see it sooner rather than later.”  

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Love Style: A Tim Love Timeline

2000. Opens Lonesome Dove Western Bistro in the Fort Worth Stockyards

2002. Purchases legendary White Elephant Saloon in the Stockyards

2006. Opens Duce in Fort Worth and a Lonesome Dove in New York

2007. Closes Lonesome Dove New York after six months

2007. Opens Love Shack burger joint in Stockyards

2007. Defeats Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto in episode of “Iron Chef America”

2008. Sells Duce

2009. Opens Love Shack on West 7th in Fort Worth.

2010. Founds Burgers 4 Babies nonprofit, benefiting NICU Helping Hands

2012. Opens Woodshed Smokehouse on Trinity River off of University, becoming first restaurateur to orient itself to the waterfront. Woodshed named one of Bon Appétit’s “50 Best New Restaurants”

2012. Closes Love Shack West 7th, opens one on TCU Bluebonnet Circle

2012. Co-founds Austin Food + Wine Festival

2013. Closes Love Shack Bluebonnet Circle

2013. Opens Queenie’s Steakhouse in Denton

2014 – 16. Begins co-hosting the reality TV series “Restaurant Startup,” in which teams of potential restaurateurs vie to pitch ideas to the hosts, have 36 hours to develop a business plan, and re-pitch their idea to Love and Bastianich

2014. Love’s first attempt at catering a golf tournament, the Colonial Invitational, marked by long lines and product shortages

2015. Out as Colonial caterer

2015. Opens a Lonesome Dove in downtown Austin

2016. Opens a Lonesome Dove in alma mater city of Knoxville, Tennessee

2017. Announces deal to create new menu items for the Knoxville-based Pilot Flying J truck stops

2019. Opens Gemelle, an Italian restaurant in Fort Worth named after his twin daughters

2020. Opens Ático, a tapas bar on the rooftop of the SpringHill Suites in the Stockyards

March 2020. Expects to open a Woodshed and Love Shack in Houston’s Levy Park

Later 2020: Expanding catering deal with Live Nation concert promoter, expanding consulting arrangement with truck stop deal