Drago's Will Open A Big New Restaurant In Hilton Riverside Early Next Year

Can't get a table at Drago's in less than a half-hour in Metairie? Start thinking about driving downtown. The Cvitanovich family just finalized a deal to open a big new restaurant in the Hilton Riverside Hotel, at the foot of Poydras Street.

Big. Three hundred eighty-two seats big. That's about double the size of the Metairie restaurant. Which will, of course, keep going.

As in most deals like this, the hotel gives a good deal to a name restaurant operator, which owns the business and runs all aspects of it. The result is that the hotel gets a much more interesting eatery than anything its corporate guys could come up with. (How excited, really, have you ever been about Kabby's?) With, in this case, a locally famous name attached to it.

The restaurant will be on the first floor, where the hotel has maintained a number of anonymous cafes and lounges over the years. Those with long memories may recall Winston's, the flagship restaurant of the hotel when it first opened, as having been in that space.

Tommy Cvitanovich (Drago's son and the linchpin of the operation) has been working on this for some time. Both he and the hotel are very eager to get on with it, and they should have the place running early next year.

The design will be reminiscent of that of the Metairie original. The menu and prices will be the same, too.

Drago's has come a long way from the sleepy (but always excellent) seafood restaurant Drago and Klara Cvitanovich opened in 1970. It was in Fat City before there was a Fat City.

The question that comes to mind involves consistency. But the Cvitanoviches seem to have a powerful knowledge of restaurant operations, and they're at least as qualified to run a big restaurants as anyone else I know.

Tom Fitzmorris