HOUSTON — When Toni Williams showed up for work on Friday, June 12 at Gotti’s, a popular Cajun restaurant in Houston’s East Downtown (EaDo) neighborhood, she tried to park in her usual metered spot across the street from the restaurant but was told by a parking attendant that she would be towed.
It was hours before FIFA’s World Cup fan festival opened to the public and the area was crawling with festival workers and police officers who prepared to welcome soccer fans. To Williams and other local businesspeople, however, the environment has felt less accommodating.
EaDo business owners located near the FIFA Fan Fest say they were told to expect increased customer traffic during the World Cup. Instead, during the tournament’s opening week, staff and customers are struggling to navigate street closures and higher parking fees.
“I hope they change something, seriously, because it’s gonna hurt us,” said Williams, the general manager at Gotti’s. “We expected for it to bring more revenue, more business, more foot traffic, and it’s not. It’s hurting us.”
Employees at Koffeteria, a bakery and coffee shop, were surprised to find this week that the entire street in front of the shop’s main entrance was closed off to foot and vehicle traffic, reserved for emergency vehicles and first responders. On June 11, the first day of Fan Fest, police officers turned away people who tried to walk through.
Frustrated, Koffeteria made multiple social media posts lamenting the situation. By Friday, June 12, police were granting access to pedestrians. But operations manager Andreas Hager, who runs Koffeteria with his husband, chef-owner Vanarian Kuch, said business has still been slower than usual.
“We see businesses around us being really scared to speak up,” Hager said. “When we posted that video, a lot of them reached out to us, telling us issues that they were having but they told us they didn’t want to bother the higher powers. … We wanted to speak up and we knew that we had to make a big fuss if we wanted to see things change.”
The FIFA festival adds another obstacle for EaDo businesses that have already been dealing with months of construction from two ongoing projects to expand the interstate and the downtown convention center.
“It’s been a stretch of really challenging times and I think that’s kind of why yesterday felt like the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Hager said.
Inside Gotti’s on Friday just before 1 p.m., two hours after the restaurant opened and 30 minutes after the fan festival opened, the usual peak lunch hour consisted of one table of customers.
Williams said she’s heard from customers and food delivery service drivers who are confused about how to get to the restaurant and where to park, which is hurting Gotti’s takeout business as well as dine-in business.
“It’s just been a headache, to be honest,” Williams said.
Some patrons are avoiding the area altogether because they don’t think it’s worth the effort, said Bryan Hucke, co-owner of Vietnamese restaurant Huynh. Hucke added that while he believes the perception is worse than reality, Huynh’s regulars were down substantially at the start of the World Cup.
“If yesterday was any indication, it was a little bit of a disappointment,” Hucke said on June 12. “We’ve been here for 18 years so we’ve already developed a pretty good following of regular guests and a lot of them, I think, chose not to come and get involved in all the potential for traffic and parking issues.”
Metered street parking in the area has been shut down, while parking lots – many privately owned – hiked up prices and are charging between $30-$50 to enter. FIFA distributed $5 parking passes to some businesses, but not all. Even if they do have parking, employees often arrive hours early for work and leave later than they are supposed to because road closures during festival hours make it difficult to get in and out.
Hager said that Koffeteria’s landlord wanted to charge the bakery $200 per car to park in a nearby lot; employees are instead parking for free in a lot owned by another business. Williams is waiting to receive parking passes from FIFA but said in the meantime some of her employees have been parking or getting dropped off one mile away from Gotti’s and trudging through the heat.
“Everybody came in smelling like wet puppies yesterday,” Williams said. “I didn’t like that, but that’s what we’re dealing with.”
Huynh, which has its own parking lot and is located on the western edge of the neighborhood closest to downtown, is trying to keep its lot clear for customers and deliveries. Hucke said police originally planned a barricade that would have blocked off the restaurant’s parking lot but that they moved it at his request.
While FIFA officials and local authorities shared some security plans with businesses ahead of time, Hager said Koffeteria received conflicting information because organizers didn’t always communicate updates as plans changed.
Williams said that the fan festival erected a tent and metal barricades blocking the path from Gotti’s to its grease trap building, where restaurants are mandated by the health department to safely dispose of grease. Nobody consulted Gotti’s about this, according to Williams, and employees now must ask someone to move the barricades every time they want to access the grease trap building.
In addition to access issues, hot temperatures in the 90s and late kickoff times for some World Cup games might dissuade people from visiting the area earlier in the day. Houston’s Fan Fest opens to the public every day 90 minutes before the first game and has a strict maximum capacity of 7,500 people.
On June 11 during the Mexico vs. South Africa opener, the festival quickly reached capacity and organizers had to turn away other fans, some of whom then went to nearby bars and restaurants to watch the game.
Hucke said the influx of soccer fans has partly helped his restaurant make up for the downturn in normal business, but not to the level that he expected. Regardless, he said he’s tried to take initiative to solve problems by communicating with the East Downtown Management District and FIFA.
This is Houston’s first time hosting the World Cup, which will feature seven matches played at NRG Stadium. Hucke said he encourages people to look at the road closure map posted on the Fan Fest’s website before they travel to EaDo.
“I think it’s a city learning curve,” Hucke said. “I hope that as we start to go through this process, there’ll be a little bit of a learning curve for our guests, and we’ll get some of those to take a risk to come back and fight the crowds.”
As the World Cup continues, EaDo businesses hope the FIFA Fan Fest will attract more people to the neighborhood. Hager said he wants to make it clear that he does not resent FIFA or the World Cup but simply wants to find a better way to support local businesses during the tournament.
“We are really excited for Houston to be hosting this event,” Hager said. “We hope the city learns from the chaos of this event and they can plan better in the future.”