Daily Gather is back open at CityCentre after a two-week blackout that started when black smoke began pouring out of the ground near the restaurant on August 4, according to co-founder Aaron Lyons. What CityCentre and CenterPoint engineers first estimated would be a two-to-three-day fix instead stretched into a two-week closure, wiping out the restaurant's first half of Houston Restaurant Weeks and forcing staff to scramble to prep food in time for Wednesday's planned reopening.
The outage traces back to a malfunctioning underground transformer, as reported by CultureMap Houston. Per MetroNational, CenterPoint Energy isolated the affected electrical service, but the underground damage required excavation and access to multiple buried junction boxes and conduit pathways before repairs could even begin. MetroNational's electrical contractor worked continuously to locate, access, and repair the damaged infrastructure, the outlet reported, and the complex nature of the repair pushed the timeline well past the original three-day estimate.
Daily Gather, Bellagreen, and Jeni's Ice Cream all remained closed until the power problem was resolved Monday, while other CityCentre tenants found workarounds. The Moran CityCentre hotel and Yardhouse both acquired generators to stay open during the outage. Lyons said he asked about getting a temporary generator for Daily Gather too, but CityCentre management told him there wasn't room on the property — the hotel was taking up all the available space, according to Lyons. He ultimately did not rent one himself.
A Costly Two Weeks During Houston's Biggest Dining Fundraiser
The timing stung. Daily Gather lost the first two weeks of the 2026 edition of Houston Restaurant Weeks, the 38-day charity dining event that runs from August 1 through Labor Day across more than 350 restaurants in Harris, Montgomery, and Galveston counties. Under the event's donation structure, restaurants give the Houston Food Bank $5 for every $55 dinner menu sold, generating 15 meals per sale — meaning two weeks of lost sales at Daily Gather also meant two weeks of lost donations to the food bank. Last year's campaign raised $1,651,698 for the Houston Food Bank, pushing its cumulative total past $23 million since food journalist Cleverley Stone founded the event in 2003.
Lyons said the closure compounded an already rough summer for the restaurant, telling CultureMap Houston, “Summer has been super slow. World Cup killed our business.” He added that he paid his employees for the entire closure and plans to file a business interruption insurance claim that he hopes may cover lost revenue and food waste. Whether that claim succeeds is an open question: standard commercial property insurance in Texas generally covers business income loss only from direct physical damage on-site, and typically excludes off-premises utility failures like a transformer outage unless a business specifically purchased an off-premises utility service interruption endorsement, according to Aegis Insurance & Financial Services.
CityCentre's Shifting Ownership
The outage also lands amid a broader consolidation of CityCentre's ownership. MetroNational acquired part of CityCentre in 2025, and by May 2026 had taken full ownership of the 14,645-square-foot ground-floor retail space at 800 Sorella Court that houses both Daily Gather and Yardhouse, alongside the adjacent Moran CityCentre hotel in a joint venture with Rockbridge. That deal followed MetroNational's October 2025 purchase of CityCentre's 309,144-square-foot open-air retail component, consolidating commercial and dining property management across the 47-acre mixed-use complex in West Houston.
CenterPoint Energy, which delivers electricity to roughly 2.7 million customers across Greater Houston through a network that includes about 26,000 miles of underground distribution lines, is the utility responsible for maintaining and repairing the grid hardware behind the outage. Daily Gather posted a public update on Monday asking local patrons for their support as staff prepared to reopen and rejoin the remainder of Houston Restaurant Weeks, reassuring customers they'd still be able to order the restaurant's $55 prix-fixe menu before the promotion wraps up on Labor Day.
Back on the Menu Wednesday
Daily Gather hopes to open in time for lunch on Wednesday and will resume dinner service the same day, with staff repairing outage-related damage and preparing food for the relaunch. The restaurant's four-course Houston Restaurant Weeks menu, priced at $55, includes elote cornbread, watermelon salad, shrimp pasta in poblano cream sauce, and sumac-marinated roast chicken. It's a fitting sampler of Daily Gather's regular menu, which blends Southern, Italian, Vietnamese, and other global influences, sources much of its produce from Texas farms, and updates seasonally under culinary direction that dates back to the restaurant's 2022 opening.
Daily Gather is owned and operated by Houston-based Five 12 Restaurant Concepts, founded by Aaron Lyons and Trent Patterson, which also runs six locations of Dish Society across Greater Houston and Austin. The company launched Daily Gather in 2022 as its second brand, opening in a 6,000-square-foot space at CityCentre that seats up to 250 guests indoors and on its patio. For now, the bigger test is whether Houston diners will return in force to help the restaurant make up for lost time — and lost charity dollars — before Houston Restaurant Weeks wraps up on Labor Day.
