Until last night, Mike Johnson had been a minority owner of Boogaloo. Today, he's 85% owner of the 5-year-old Maplewood restaurant. Terms of the transfer were not disclosed.
Johnson's no stranger to the space....he designed it, helped build it, wrote the "Cubano, Creole, Caribe" themed menu, trained the staff, and worked in the kitchen--he even came up with the controversial logo. It was his idea to place those swings at the bar. When the restaurant opened 5 years ago, I mentioned the only place I'd seen bar swings like that was at a little beach bar in Playa del Carmen. Apparently, neither one of us forgot The Blue Parrot.
There are no changes planned for left side of Booglaoo, the bar side, the side with the swings. But the mirror-image room to the right will undergo a minor face lift to take on a more "Garden District patio" type of vibe (surplus from the old Bobby's Creole up the street, perhaps?) and maybe "a hint of voodoo" thrown in. The restaurant will remain open during that transition which is expected to take only a week.
The menu is already in transition...look for half of it to change, with a new emphasis on smoked fish, meats, and ribs.
A few years ago, I saw Johnson win an RFT 4-chef challenge at the Ritz Carlton, having thrown a protein and Ritz-kitchen foodstuffs together at the last minute (the other chefs had allegedly been practicing and dry-running items for a week).
Johnson's mentored many chefs, both young and not-so (see the Perfect Pairings pictorial in the Oct 2010 SLM) and is a frequent guest on KMOV's Great Day St. Louis.
Boogaloo is but one of Johnson's mostly successful string of restaurants (Cafe Mira, Figaro, Barcelona, Mom's, Cyrano's, Roxane, and El Scorch, if anyone's counting). The only real clinker was Fu Manchu (now the The Red Lion), just a few doors up Manchester, a restaurant that, for some reason, never achieved critical mass, never got as hot as that Chinese-red front door.
