Chef Mashama Bailey Is Closing Her Two Austin Restaurants

Co-founders and business partners chef Mashama Bailey and Johno Morsiano are going to be closing their only Texas restaurants this summer in downtown Austin. Southern restaurant Diner Bar and casual cafe the Grey Market will have their last days inside the Thompson Austin hotel at 500 San Jacinto Boulevard on Sunday, July 14.

Diner Bar and Grey Market are closing because their host site’s parent company Hyatt Hotels is turning its restaurants into in-house operations, according to Bobby Hernandez, the general manager Diner and Grey. Or, as Hernandez writes in email: “The Thompson Hotel’s ownership is continuing to internalize all [food & beverage] operations,” a process that started earlier this year. The hotel’s revenue and reservations manager, Melina Indrasena, confirmed the last day of service.

The Thompson Austin’s switch to in-house restaurants tracks with what happened with the the downtown hotel’s other restaurant/bar, Wax Myrtle’s. It had been run by Chicago-based restaurant group Land and Sea Dept when the hotel opened in February 2022. However, the rooftop spot closed at the end of 2023, and was replaced by a new Mexican restaurant, Arriba Abajo, in March 2024.

Bailey and Morsiano opened their first-ever Texas restaurants in 2022, starting with Grey Market that March, and followed by Diner Bar that April. The restaurants, much like their other one — the original Grey in Savannah, which they opened in 2014 — are rooted in Southern and East Coast port city-style cuisines. Bailey won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southeast in 2019 for the Georgia-based restaurant, and then the Outstanding Chef award in 2022.

Hernandez writes that the Grey team is focusing on their already-announced restaurant in Paris, which is aiming to open in late 2024 or early 2025.

This impending Diner Bar/Grey Market shutter is similar to another out-of-town chef’s Austin hotel shutter this year. San Antonio chef Steve McHugh had opened his first two local restaurants, Luminaire and Las Bis, inside of the Hyatt Centric Congress Avenue Austin in downtown in February 2023. Just less than a year later, the hotel and rooftop bar suddenly closed on January 1, 2024. The hotel’s statement cited that the hotel and the restaurant group “decided to part ways.”