A new all-day restaurant named after a French bulldog is set to take over a 5,100-square-foot former office lobby in downtown Houston this fall, offering breakfast, business lunch, cocktails and dinner from one address inside the GreenStreet complex. Lila's will skip a traditional ribbon cutting, instead opening in stages through smaller gatherings, with breakfast and lunch service expected to begin in mid-October 2026 and dinner following in mid-November.
The restaurant sits at 1201 Fannin Street, occupying the former ground-floor office lobby with an entrance tucked into an alleyway between McCormick & Schmick's and The Palm, according to CultureMap Houston. As WhatNow reports, Lila's is designed to serve the customer using a laptop at 10 a.m. just as well as the one still at the bar when it closes at 10 p.m., with an all-day New American menu drawing on Houston's diverse culinary traditions and seasonal ingredients from local farmers and purveyors.
A Concept Built Around a Dog's Standards
Lila's is named after Tristan Simon's French bulldog, and per WhatNow's reporting, Simon said the restaurant will aim to meet his dog's exacting standards. Simon is the founder of Rebees, the Houston-based hospitality management company behind GreenStreet, and previously founded Dallas-based Consilient Hospitality, which he later sold. Simon said GreenStreet needed a hospitality concept that Rebees knew how to build, according to the same report.
The restaurant marks Rebees' second proprietary dining concept following Billy Can Can, the upscale Dallas saloon that opened in 2018, notes CultureMap. Billy Can Can executive chef and partner Matt Ford is contributing to Lila's menu development alongside executive chef Garee Battad, per WhatNow. Battad brings two decades of hotel dining experience to the project, having previously served as executive chef at Azumi in Houston's River Oaks District, Nobu at Hotel Crescent Court in Dallas, and Charlie Palmer at The Joule Dallas.
Cocktails, Coffee, and a Hotel-Inspired Welcome
Lila's includes an ingredient-driven cocktail program led by mixologist Zach Smigiel, who previously crafted drinks at Dallas saloon Billy Can Can and earned a Bartender of the Year nomination in CultureMap Dallas's Tastemaker Awards for his work at Deep Ellum's Black Swan Saloon, according to Barmoire. The restaurant offers breakfast and coffee in the morning, business lunch through the day, and cocktails and dinner into the night, with a setting the team says is inspired by the warmth and service of a boutique hotel. Rebees' Chief Hospitality Officer Matt Ragan, a former Consilient Hospitality executive, is helping shape that boutique-hotel-level welcome inside what is otherwise an everyday neighborhood restaurant.
Behind the scenes, Rebees plans to pair the restaurant with a proprietary digital app letting office tenants at 1201 Fannin Street order coffee, meals, or drinks delivered straight to their desks, part of a strategy it calls the “hotelization of the workplace,” per Realty News Report. Construction alteration filings for the project estimated the lobby renovation budget at $1.3 million across nearly 4,800 square feet, with BII GStreet, LLC listed as property owner and RIOS as designer, according to Zabalist.
Part of a Larger Bet on GreenStreet
Lila's opening is one piece of Rebees' broader $10 million renovation of GreenStreet, a 610,000-square-foot mixed-use complex in Houston's central business district, according to The Real Deal. Designed by architecture firm RIOS, the project aims to transform the four-block property into an Osaka-inspired pedestrian alleyway lined with dining, nightlife, and retail. GreenStreet originally opened in 2006 as Houston Pavilions before Midway acquired, renovated, and rebranded it in 2013, the outlet reports.
The push for ground-floor hospitality follows years of struggle for the complex's 11-story office tower, which faced a 44% vacancy rate after its 260,000-square-foot anchor tenant, NRG Energy, departed in 2018. Rebees has also set an internal construction schedule to finish major GreenStreet renovations before the 2026 FIFA World Cup, leveraging dining concepts like Lila's to capture international tourism, as Hoodline previously reported. WhatNow describes GreenStreet more broadly as a gathering space in downtown Houston's theater district, and Lila's ground-floor debut this fall will be an early test of whether that timeline holds.
