A Fort Worth restaurant veteran has opened a prime steakhouse in Keller, filling a niche in the city’s thriving restaurant scene.
Longtime restaurateur Zack Moutaouakil opened Keller Chophouse in August, taking over the building originally occupied by Texas Bleu. Hit by COVID-19, Texas Bleu — which opened in 2015 and whose kitchen was once led by acclaimed Fort Worth chef Stefon Rishel — closed earlier this summer.
In an effort to resurrect a fine dining concept in the attractive two-story space, the owners approached Moutaouakil, who has more than two decades of experience in the steakhouse world. He has owned two Mercury Chophouse restaurants — the long-running location in downtown Fort Worth at the base of The Tower and its Arlington counterpart, housed in the Brookhollow Two office building.
“The owners said, ‘Do you know somebody who’d want to take this over?’” Moutaouakil says. “My wife and I went up there to look at it and said, ‘What about us?’ It’s a great location, it’s small so there’s not much overhead, and there’s no one else in Keller doing fine dining.”
After three weeks of renovations, Keller Chophouse opened, brandishing a menu of prime steaks, elegantly presented towers of seafood, escargot, and Maine lobster.
“For diners here in Keller, it fills a void,” Moutaouakil says. “Otherwise, they’d have to drive to Fort Worth or Dallas if they wanted prime steaks or the quality of seafood we’re doing.” For beef, he relies solely on Allen Brothers of Chicago, which he has been using for 25 years. “It’s top of the line,” he says.
Moutaouakil’s journey to becoming a restaurant owner is a little unusual. While working as a manager at the original location of Mercury Chophouse, then owned by M Restaurant Group and located where Waters is today, Moutaouakil noticed a group of people had been eyeing the restaurant, as if they were going to buy it.
“I told the M Group, if you’re going to sell the restaurant, sell it to me. I already know how to run it,” he says. “And just like that, I owned it. That’s how fast I got into this.”
He later moved Chophouse to The Tower, then opened a second location in 2017 in Arlington, in the space long occupied by La Cacharel. He opened the Arlington location with local attorney Jim Ross, then sold his share to Ross in January, effectively severing ties with the Arlington outpost.
The smaller, more intimate Keller location is more his speed these days. “I’m not getting any younger,” he says, laughing. “I have a wife and two kids, and I want to spend as much time with them as I can. But you can’t run a restaurant remotely. You must be there. So, finding that balance is what’s important to me now, especially in this crazy, unpredictable world we’re living in.”
124 S. Main St., Keller, 817.431.5188
