Austin Modern Mexican Restaurant Bacalar Closes to Make Way for a More Casual Taqueria

Bacalar and Tómalo is owned by real estate company Urbanspace, which has been getting into the hospitality field since 2020. CEO Kevin Burns tells Eater that the decision to close down Bacalar happened because it ultimately wasn’t serving the neighborhood. “Our original intent for this restaurant was to be fun dining,” he says, but the restaurant ended up leaning more high-end. “It became known as the place that people wanted to go to for a special event,” he says, “and that goes completely against the grain of what I wanted.”

Burns cites that the number of repeat customers was lower than the group wanted. Then there’s the fact that long-in-the-works Rainey Street trailhead park project was under construction until early July, meaning the restaurant overlooked an uninviting worksite for most of its tenure.

Tómalo will remain open and serve food as the address slowly undergoes changes to run through Bacalar’s food inventory, too. The full restaurant should reopen in August.

The revamped Tómalo is meant to work as a grill restaurant suitable for everything from casual dining to big occasions. The menu will focus on more tacos and grilled items like fish and vegetables (making use of the on-site Josper oven), sold at comparatively more affordable prices — though it’ll keep Bacalar’s large tomahawk steak. It’ll still serve cocktails, including tequila and mezcal drinks. The change is being overseen by Urbanspace’s director of hospitality, Ben Smith, who was previously the general manager of now-closed Austin restaurant Provision Dining House.

Burns says that Urbanspace’s decision to end its partnership with Erales was “financially driven.”. Having a chef of his caliber wasn’t economically logical, or as he put it, the new Tómalo didn’t “need to have an award-winning chef; we need to have really good chefs.” The current Bacalar team will be given the opportunity to stay on through the transition if they want to. Urbanspace’s official statement explains:

As we embark on this exciting transition, we want to express our profound gratitude to chef Gabe Erales. While he will not continue with Tomalo, we were privileged to have him on our team. During this transition, the Tomalo window will remain open with regular hours.

Through Bacalar, Erales writes to Eater that he wanted to “create a thoughtful project of inclusion and proper representation of Mexican culture.” The goal was to open an everyday-type of restaurant, “but seemed to quickly be perceived as a special occasion restaurant,” he writes. Ultimately, that, along with Rainey Street’s forever-construction, the “financial strains of sourcing indigenous ingredients directly from the Yucatán, and the challenging environment of the industry in Austin made it very difficult to be profitable.” Because of the pivot to casual dining, “we have decided to end our partnership as planning for this new transition begins.”

Erales was the opening executive chef of also-downtown Austin modern Mexican restaurant Comedor in 2019. The El Paso-born chef competed on cooking competition series Top Chef’s 18th season, and after the filming concluded in October 2020, the restaurant announced that the chef was fired in December 2020, because of “repeated violations of our policies and for behavior in conflict with our values.” He was announced as a contender on the show in February 2021. As the season aired that spring and summer there were anonymous online speculations as to the nature of why he was fired.

Erales ended up winning the season — the first Mexican American to have done so — and at the same time, Statesman reported that Erales was fired because of alleged sexual harassment of an employee that he had a relationship with. Fellow contestants took issue with how the show handled the situation.

Simultaneously with the win and harassment allegations, Erales announced he was opening Bacalar (named after the Mexican city in the Quintana Roo state) and Tómalo with Urbanspace Hospitality. Bacalar’s menu focused on sit-down Yucatán cuisine and Tómalo was the casual walk-up taco and cocktail restaurant, both of which opened in September 2023. Two months later, he opened a Texas Mexican restaurant in Virginia, Ometeo, with Long Shot Hospitality Group.

Urbanspace’s first food-and-beverage business is downtown bar and coffee shop Codependent, which opened in September 2020. It’s also working on an unnamed residents-membership space on the ground floor of fellow Rainey Street development, the Modern. Burns tells Eater that he sees it functioning as a daytime membership space and nighttime reservations restaurant and bar space. Its basement will be home to a club run by Austin entrepreneur Bridget Dunlap — the address took over what had been Dunlap’s Container Bar, which closed right after South by Southwest in 2022 along with Bungalow.