Since late April, Next Restaurant, run by the Alinea Group, has celebrated Bobby Flay’s first restaurant and channeled the ‘90s spirit that made Mesa Grill a hit in New York City. The restaurant opened in 1991 when Flay was 25.
Alinea Chef Grant Achatz has touted Flay as one of his influences. Mesa Grill was where Achatz first dined during a maiden trip to Manhattan. A Las Vegas location would open in 2004 inside the Caesars Palace casino; it closed in 2020. Achatz hails Flay as one of the first chefs, along with Brendan Walsh, the chef at New York’s Arizona 206, to bring Southwestern cuisine to the masses.
“Looking back now, nearly 30 years later, it is easy to see the similarities of approach our food at The Alinea Group has with that out-of-the-box, risk-taking, new style that chef Flay (helped) introduce to the American culinary scene,” Achatz writes to Eater.
Achatz adds: “Pre-Internet and culinary globalization, most Americans had never been exposed to the ingredients and techniques featured in his dishes, as French was still the dominating cuisine in American fine dining. The deeply flavored layering of chilies, blue corn, tamales, empanadas, mole — and even margaritas — were still not common.”
Flay dined at Next earlier in May and enjoyed the trip down memory lane. 2024 is the year of the tribute for Next, which honored Julia Child in January. Chicago’s own Charlie Trotter will be featured from September through the end of the year. Next will embrace the Mesa Grill motif until September 1. The common thread for the trio is TV and food.
While Child may have pioneered the role of TV chef, Flay’s presence shows an evolution with the birth of Food Network. He’s brought Next a different sort of attention — Flay’s fans flying into Chicago from across the country for another taste of Mesa Grill. Achatz mentions Flay’s role in “educating and influencing so many home cooks at a critical time in American eating.”
The Alinea Group’s co-founder Nick Kokonas tells Eater that Flay was flattered and graciously gave them his blessing. They considered titling their effort “Next: Mesa Grill” but weren’t sure if most Americans make the connection to the celebrity chef without Flay’s name in the title.
“We emailed him and had a conversation about Mesa Grill and the fact that it was hugely impactful for the industry, but a bit lost to history because of all of the TV work he has done,” Kokonas writes. “He said he was honored that we wanted to focus on his cuisine and he’d let us do the menu without any strings attached — and he’s been very generous with his time, opinions, and historical documentation of the Mesa Grill recipes and ideas.”
Achatz says Flay encouraged the staff at Next to “take some liberties” with their menu: “It was important to both of us that we show some of TAG’s fingerprints within the foundation of his food,” Achatz says. “We were very careful to make sure the flavor profiles and backbone of all the dishes represented on the menu had all the touchstones of the originals.”
The menu provides opportunities for fans to enjoy nostalgia while giving younger diners a chance to see what made chefs like Flay household names.
“I would say that all food and travel-related TV programs raise awareness, education, and create passion within the viewers for food and beverage,” Achatz writes. “This creates and continually builds the group of people that make traveling to dine out a hobby, thereby making our restaurants busier.”
“Getting people curious, educated, comfortable and excited to experience restaurants through TV is a fantastic commercial for all hospitality regardless of the specific theme of the show.”
Fans got their first glimpse of Season 3 of FX’s The Bear on Wednesday, April 3, when a 53-second clip from Disney’s shareholders meeting, held earlier on Wednesday, landed on social media. The clip has since been taken down. There’s no exact release date for the new season, but the episodes should land on Hulu sometime in June.
Season 2 concludes with the opening of the Bear, a new restaurant that should better showcase Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) and Sydney Adamu’s (Ayo Edebiri) fine dining experience. Food media didn’t play a big role in previous seasons, and that may change. The leaked clip features Neil Fak (Matty Matheson) chatting with his brother, Ted (Ricky Staffieri) in the back of the Bear, in the restaurant’s office. The Faks yell out to call Carmy to enter so they can unveil a surprise.
The camera pans to a wall of 10 framed photos filled with portraits. It’s a diverse crew including a white guy wearing tinted glasses and a school-aged girl smiling. Fak points to the wall and tells Carmy these are snapshots of “every major food critic.”
“I hate this feeling,” Carmy says, looking anxious while scanning the photos from a distance.
After Fak asks Carmy to clarify, the chef replies: “I’m not sure, this looks good, though,” he says to the Faks. “This is smart — good job.”
The camera pans over to the photos and it seems the Fak brothers have written a few words under each critic’s name. There are two women named “Eliza Cameron.” One is listed as a blogger and photographer — the photo is of Sue Chan, food industry vet and former brand director at Momofuku. A second “Eliza” is noted as “mysterious” — “She wrote a couple food books. Didn’t read, though,” the photo reads. Another photograph is of Julian Black, a former assistant general manager at New York’s famed Carbone and currently at Prince Street Hospitality. The array also includes New Yorker writer Naomi Fry.
There’s also the curious case of a critic named “Philip Smart.” He’s dressed in a suit and tie — the photo is actually Chris Black of the podcast How Long Gone. Not all of the text is readable, but zooming in, viewers might be able to make out: “He’s from Atlanta, Doesn’t know shit about Chicago. Tough Guy?” The photo also reads: “Likes room temp water. He’s fake sophisticated.”
It’s impossible to know for sure, but the Atlanta reference might be inspired by Chicago magazine critic John Kessler, a former critic for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He’s often lamented Chicago’s flaws.
An FX rep says the clip wasn’t approved for wide sharing and asked for the footage to be pulled. Will this scene remain in the show? Chicago and the rest of the world will have to wait until June to find out.
Update, Wednesday, April 3, 4 p.m.: This piece has been updated to reflect that the footage was taken down by FX.
Avgeria Stapaki aims to make that first impression a memorable one as the Greek chef tonight — Friday, March 29 — opens Tama, a Bucktown restaurant where inventive Mediterranean-style cuisine stars.
Stapaki and co-owner Adalberto Olaez (Lao Peng You, Boeufhaus) have created an ambitious menu that stands apart from Chicago’s crowded and competitive Mediterranean dining scene. They view the regional genre as more of a guideline than a rule and apply an international lens to singular creations like avgolemono ramen, a Greek-Japanese mashup featuring ramen noodles made in-house, swiss chard “nori,” and crispy chicken; dolma with tabbouleh and beurre blanc; and unctuous short rib orzo. In keeping with the theme of freedom, patrons can expect menu changes multiple times per year, leaving room for seasonal switches and sparks of inspiration.
Stapaki and Olaez have painted, sanded, and sculpted for months to reshape the 80-seat restaurant that sits on two levels at 1952 N. Damen Avenue. On the first floor, Tama will offer counter service and a bar where patrons can find six signature cocktails and a selection of moderately priced wines by the glass. The second floor is devoted entirely to dining and will be available for private events. An outdoor patio is also in the works, as Stapaki navigates the city’s licensing process.
Dolma (tabbouleh, beurre blanc).Tama
Tama marks a fresh chapter for the restaurant space, which previously housed a long line of fine dining restaurants including Michelin-starred Claudia, Stone Flower, Takashi, and Stephanie Izard’s Scylla. A warm and earthy color palette is designed to evoke Greek, North African, and Middle Eastern sensibilities, and the team has installed lush olive trees to lend an organic feel.
The team imported lights from Morocco for the first-floor space and had hoped to bring in even bigger versions for the second floor, but the exorbitant price forced Stapaki to pivot. Instead, she spent a week of eight-hour days sculpting domed fixtures out of cement and plaster. It’s a dramatic departure from the fussy formality of fine dining that’s designed to attract locals with a casual atmosphere and competitive pricing, a place where passers-by can grab a meal and a glass of wine for about $65. “I like that we put our hands on this,” she says. “We painted it, we fixed the lights — we actually worked for it.”
The opening is a liberation day for Stapaki, too, as she is at last free to reintroduce her food to Chicago on her own terms. A veteran chef who began her career at Nobu Matsuhisa’s restaurant in Athens, Stapaki left her native Greece in 2019 and moved to Chicago to lead the kitchen at Nisos, a flamboyant Mediterranean restaurant that was among 2022’s most hotly anticipated openings. In spring 2023, however, Nisos’ owners at Parker Hospitality decided to close and revamp the venue, which has since reopened as a steakhouse. In the end, Stapaki says the split came down to compatibility, and she felt more at home working alongside Olaez, Nisos’ former chef de cuisine.
The thrill of independence, however, is often accompanied by significant pressure, at least in the hospitality industry. Stapaki is acutely aware of the weight of her responsibilities, particularly as Tama has no investors or corporate backing. When the stress feels overwhelming, she says she’s found solace in her friendship with R.J. Melman, president of Chicago restaurant behemoth Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises.
She credits him as a steadfast supporter following her mother’s death after a heart attack in Greece during the early pandemic, and a shoulder to lean on when her hopes for Nisos went awry. They’d even considered a collaboration, “But he was like, ‘You don’t need me. I want you to shine on your own,’” Stapaki says. “I liked that.”
Read Tama’s opening menu below.
Tama, 1952 N. Damen Avenue, Scheduled to open Friday, March 29.
When Shonya Williams, better known as Chef Royce, received a call from her daughter Tot in winter of 2022, she thought her prayers had been answered. Williams had suffered a stroke in 2019, which led her to close her two-and-a-half-year-old restaurant, Kiss My Dish in suburban Oswego. A veteran restaurateur who has opened four restaurants, Royce was taking time to heal while working as a caterer when she received her daughter’s call about a restaurant location that was being advertised as a turnkey rental at the corner of Armitage Avenue and Halsted Street in Lincoln Park.
Williams was already looking to open a new restaurant on the city’s West Side in Austin, but her daughter’s call was a sign: “I really wanted to be back on the scene again. [Cooking] is what I love. So I asked God, ‘When is it gonna be my turn again? I want to do this again.”
Williams signed a lease in Lincoln Park on March 15, 2023 across the street from where Chicago’s largest hospitality group, Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, has three restaurants and a fourth on its way. She spent two months renovating the former Taco Bar space, opening Soul Prime, a soul food restaurant with fried chicken, fried catfish, and lobster on the menu, in time for Mother’s Day. But just four months later with a monthly rent of $14,338.51 and sales of less than $1,000 a day, she was thinking of closing.
Shonya Williams is better known as Chef Royce.Chef Royce of Soul Prime stands in front of her restaurant smiling wearing an apron.
Mac and cheese is one of the specialties.
“I didn’t have loans or grants,” Williams says. “I have money that I have saved on my own. And I used every single dollar getting the place to a beautiful look inside, so that I can match this amazing community. I needed support from this actual community that I sit in, which I didn’t know a whole lot about. Unfortunately, I did not spend any money on marketing. I felt like people knew [me and my work], and it didn’t work like that.”
Williams remains in business thanks, in part, to a visit from Keith Lee, an MMA fighter and popular food reviewer on TikTok. Lee reviewed Soul Prime in September 2023. In the video, he swoons over the collard green dip, fried chicken dipped in hot honey sauce, and peach lemonade while sitting curbside. He enters the restaurant after his meal is complete (something he says he’s never done before) to talk to chef Williams, who shares her struggle in bringing her vision to life and keeping it afloat.
The video is uplifting, finishing off with Lee asking Williams to ring him up for $2,200 — matching her sales for that day. But it’s Williams’s comments on the neighborhood that tell the true story of her struggle: A Black woman in a predominantly white area of Chicago trying to serve food that’s often misunderstood by the wider American culture outside of Black neighborhoods.
“I’m not getting a whole lot of reception from the community, but I need them because I’m in their community,” Williams says to Lee in the video. This is one of the few times she breaks eye contact with him and looks out the window, referring to the Lincoln Park area. “I haven’t got it.”
Soul food cooks often have to battle outside perception.
According to a 2023 Chicago Metropolitan Agency for City Planning report, Lincoln Park is a predominantly white community where 80 percent of people are white in the neighborhood even though white people comprise only 33 percent of Chicago’s population. The median household income level in the 60614 zip code is $123,044, well above the city’s median of $65,781. Soul Prime is the neighborhood’s only soul food restaurant. Soul food in Chicago is concentrated on the South and West sides.
“Soul food is one of the African heritage cuisines in the United States, bringing together the culinary ingredients, traditions, and techniques of West Africa, Western Europe, and the Americas,” says Adrian Miller, James Beard Award-winning author of Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time. “More importantly, it’s really the food that Black migrants took out of the South and transplanted in other parts of the country during the Great Migration. It is socially stigmatized because it’s associated with slavery and poverty food.”
From catfish and grits to short rib, Soul Prime’s menu has something for everyone.
Before Lee’s visit one acquaintance advised Williams to lower her prices, add salads, and bundle sides in the cost and presentation of her main dishes, instead of selling them separately. But that’s not how soul food works, Williams says. “I don’t know how to cook any other cuisines,” Williams says. “I make no salads because that’s not what I am. That’s not where I come from. That’s not what soul food is.”
Miller says this is a situation that speaks to the larger issue of a restaurateur considered an outsider, having to legitimize itself outside of her own community, while simultaneously having to educate those unfamiliar with the traditions and prep of her cuisine. Today, it’s disproportionately falling on Black influencers and celebrities like Lee to seek out, sample, and celebrate Black-owned restaurants. Just look at Ayo Edebiri: The prominent Black Golden actress and star of The Bear, who won a Golden Globe this past January for her role in the culinary drama, used her platform after the awards gala to shout out Oooh Wee It Is in Hyde Park as “some of the best food [she’s] had in her life.” These spotlights are often a boon for the business, but they highlight a seemingly ever-present segregation between communities and cuisines and how they’re valued.
Chef Williams has opened four restaurants and brought soul food to Lincoln Park’s toney community.
“People don’t want to pay a lot of money for that, so that’s why it doesn’t surprise me at all,” that someone without the understanding of soul food’s history and complexities would suggest lowering prices, Miller says. “If [Soul Prime] were just to call themselves a Southern restaurant, they could charge a lot more money. It’s really more about class and place than it is about race. People in the same socioeconomic class are usually eating the same kind of food.”
Chef Erick Williams faced a similar conundrum with Virtue in Hyde Park before he won his James Beard Award in 2022. Soul food and Southern food may look similar, but they are not the same. Miller says that soul food tends to be sweeter, more heavily spiced, and higher in fat. Soul food gets its name from the cadre of Black jazz musicians who were miffed by white jazz musicians making the most money from the musical genre that they created, says Miller. “They decided to take the music to a place where they thought white musicians could not mimic the sound. That was the sound of the Black church in the rural South. This gospel-tinged jazz sound emerged and the jazz artists themselves started calling it ‘soul’ and ‘funky’ soul. It was really ‘soul music’ first and then ‘soul’ just caught on in the culture: soul music, soul brothers, soul sister, soul food.”
The term is most typically associated with the Black Power movement of the 1960s but its usage was floating around in Black culture well before that, Miller adds. The sentiment is echoed in the 1983 book Bricktop, by Ada “Bricktop” Smith and Jim Haskins.
“I learned about soul food [in 1910], only they didn’t call it soul food then,” shares Smith, the Chicago woman and entrepreneur who became a legend overseas for playing nightlife host during Paris’ 1920s. Her clientele included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker, John Steinbeck, Duke Ellington, and Elizabeth Taylor. “Soul was something you didn’t talk about except in church. Soul food was Southern food. There weren’t all that many Negroes in Chicago when I was growing up, so it wasn’t until I went to places like Louisville and Cincinnati that I met up with Southerners and ate things like spare ribs and biscuits, sweet potatoes, and cornbread, chitlins, and fried chicken.”
Chef Royce is very proud of her team of mostly Black women.
Miller’s work is an effort to dispel misconceived notions around soul food and destigmatize years of history that have relegated it to lowbrow cuisine, synonymous with Black communities, instead of acknowledging its cultural significance that carries years of history within each bite of meat and three.
“The other main critique is that [soul food] is unhealthy,” says Miller. “There are people who think that by making soul food and serving it to our community. You’re literally digesting white supremacy because you’re celebrating stuff from slavery. There are others that say ‘Why are you serving us this food? It’s killing us because they’re looking at the health outcomes in Black communities and directly tying it to soul food. If you actually look at what enslaved people were eating, it’s very close to what we call vegan today.”
He explains how an enslaved person rose before sunrise and was fed “a trough filled with crumbled cornbread and buttermilk.” Their midday meal included seasonal vegetables, which might include meat to flavor the veggies but usually, it was only vegetables. Supper was whatever was leftover from lunch. “Only on the weekends, when work either stopped or slowed down did enslaved people get access to white flour, white sugar, meat and have cakes and desserts. That was special occasion food.”
“Like any other immigrant cuisine, soul food is the food Black people took out of the South and transplanted in other places,” says Miller. “There’s certain signatures [dishes] that show up in celebrations. If you look at any immigrant cuisine in the U.S., typically an immigrant restaurateur is serving the celebration food of their culture, because they want to show off the very best of their culture. They don’t highlight the day-in and day-out stuff. And that’s the way to think about soul food. So these things like fried chicken, barbecue, fried catfish — people are not eating that every day.”
TikTokker Keith Lee was very excited about this place.
In Lincoln Park, Williams says she’s hopeful her restaurant can find a niche: “We shouldn’t have to go through ups and downs because of our skin color and I am glad to help break that barrier with food,” she says.
Miller says there are lessons to be learned from the barbecue world where the genre was once also considered “working class, cheap food, and now people are paying $36 a pound for brisket and $20 a pound for ribs. A lot has to do with barbecue being seen as cool and hip.” That’s essentially what these influencers are doing — spreading the word about something great that other traditional arbiters of value and attention may have ignored.
To date, the September TikTok video at Soul Prime has 9 million views, 1.2 million likes, and more than 23,000 comments. Lee recapped 2023 by ranking his top cities for food (ranking Chicago in his top three) and re-mentioning Soul Prime. Today, Soul Prime is still in business, which Williams credits to Lee’s visit.
“The Keith Lee community is my local community,” says Williams. “They come and say they were sent by Keith Lee. My community is Black people. I know that we don’t live in Lincoln Park. Some of them follow me from the South Side, the South Suburbs, the West Side. The ones who I see who are non-Black, walking up and down the street, those are the ones that I really wanted to reach. They’re coming in now, I love them. I’m grateful.”
Customers have repeatedly uttered those four words this week to restaurants and bar workers all across Chicago, a city that is rejoicing after hitting the 50-degree threshold for the first time in 2024.
There’s hope, no matter what those groundhogs have revealed, of flipping the page to spring. But nothing is easy, as Thursday morning much of the country was greeted by a cell phone outage that mostly impacted AT&T customers. Overall, more than 100,000 phones have reportedly been hit.
How that outage will affect online ordering and reservations remains to be seen. AT&T has recommended that customers use WiFi calling if users want to be old fashioned, you know, the antiquated process that eliminates service fees for restaurants — unlike online ordering using a third party (DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub).
Despite the latest hurdle, there are reasons to be optimistic for the restaurant industry in Chicago. On Wednesday, the city’s tourism arm, Choose Chicago, claimed Restaurant Week as a success, sending out a release that trumped the event gaining popularity with 463 restaurants. The website drew 1.34 million page views, a 7.2 percent increase compared to 2023, and 430,000 website clicks — 32 percent more than in 2023. The 17-day “week” went from January 19 to February. It’s a promotion where participating restaurants offer set meals to bring diners in during the typically slower winter weeks.
The spring feeling is in full force as Guinness is prepping for its first St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago, with reservations for its Fulton Market brewpub live. The Chicago taproom, which opened in September, is touting five days of St. Patrick’s Day events, from Wednesday, March 13 to St. Patrick’s Day, Sunday, March 17. Customers can book a table for four, eight, or 12 or opt for general admission. The reservations come in three-hour blocks.
The city has come a long way since St. Patrick’s Day 2020 when bar owners packed revelers into their establishments right before Gov. J.B. Pritzker shut down on-premises dining to help slow the spread of COVID.
Regardless of optimism, true Chicagoans know it’s way too early to put away their shovels or heavy winter coats.
These happy pups got to break in our newly renovated Airstream!
The Airstream is a safe haven for our dogs and is designed to give them a nice AC break and a comfy couch to relax on when they need a little break from the shelter. It’s especially useful in the summer months, with a pool perfect for keeping everyone cool!
The Airstream is near and dear to a lot of hearts at APA! because of its history. Back in the day, you could find the Airstream filled with adoptable pets parked on South Congress before we had our brick and mortar building at Town Lake Animal Center. The Airstream is also where our Neonatal Kitten Nursery began. It’s hard to imagine the program fitting in a space as small as the Airstream, but in true APA! fashion, we made it work! We’ve done a lot of growing since then and our Neonatal program now has a sterile building of its own. The Airstream has stayed with us throughout the years parked at our Town Lake Shelter and has always provided a much-needed AC break to our pups, as well as a home-like setting for them to decompress. It’s seen a lot of wear and tear over the many months it has been used by our pups, so when we were approached by Lincoln Ventures about giving the Airstream a makeover, we couldn’t have been more excited.
Lincoln Ventures felt compelled to do this project for many reasons. “We as a company have a huge passion for dogs so what better way to best use our skills than to develop a better environment for the deserving dogs at APA! We knew we had the relationships with amazing vendors in town to help us pull off the makeover and our passion for design would really shine in this endeavor. We wanted to embrace the classic nature of the Airstream and create a destination on the APA! grounds that was cheerful and a departure from the somewhat stressful surroundings. A bit of a stay-cation for the pooches! The Palm Springs vibe seemed like the perfect direction with its nostalgia and playful roots in both design and travel culture.
Renovating this space for our dogs was no small project, and we had a lot of help and support from the following companies: Led by Lincoln Ventures and TBG teaming with Blue Sky Design and Build, US Lumber Brokers, Clean Scapes, Clay Imports, and Forever Lawn. These companies donated their time, talent, labor, and materials to improve the lives of the dogs in our shelter and we couldn’t be more grateful. They refreshed the interior of the Airstream trailer and even added an outdoor relaxing space, complete with a patio deck. A huge thank you to them all!
When asked what they hope the makeover will offer the people and pets of APA!, Krista from Lincoln Ventures explained that their “hope is that this indoor/outdoor retreat allows the volunteers to introduce the dogs to a safe place to escape the chaos of the shelter life and start dipping a toe into what life will be like when they land their forever home.”The Airstream gives our shelter dogs the opportunity to receive some “in-home” training before they reach their foster or forever home. Krista also hopes that “seeing these resilient animals in beautiful spaces may resonate with families looking to adopt. Not everyone can handle seeing photos of a dog in a cage, but by seeing them in a space that looks like home, they may be able to visualize adopting and incorporating these dogs into their lives.”
Our staff and volunteers couldn’t be more excited to break in our new Airstream space with every pup this fall. The dogs of APA! are ready for a pool party! Check out the photos of our dogs living the good life in their new space while they await their forever homes!
AUSTIN, TX — Tails are wagging at Austin Pets Alive! this summer, as the Central Texas shelter was announced as a winning recipient of one of The Grey Muzzle Organization’s annual grants for the fifth consecutive year.
APA! is one of 77 animal welfare groups chosen from 266 applicants to receive a grant to help local senior dogs. The winning groups received more than $616,000 in grants to help save or improve the lives of at-risk old dogs in their communities.
11-year old Tiana is one of several sweet seniors at APA! who will benefit from this grant. She earned the nickname “Queen of Chairs” from her habit of wanting to try out any chair or comfy piece of furniture she encounters. Tiana came to APA! in January 2020 as an owner surrender, and has been regularly training with the shelter’s Dog Behavior team to set her up for success in a home. This grant from the Grey Muzzle Organization gives dogs like Tiana the support they need to reach for a brighter future.
Tiana
Senior dogs often face an uphill battle finding adopters willing to take on an older pet. Many senior dogs also arrive at shelters with extensive medical needs, such as dental complications and heartworm disease, that most traditional shelters lack the resources to treat. Fortunately, APA!’s specialized programs are able to provide a crucial safety net for older dogs, covering the necessary medical care to improve their quality of life as they wait to find loving homes.
“Senior dogs are the best for so many reasons!” said APA!’s Dog Adoption Manager, Allison Swearingen. “It’s always sad to see them end up in a shelter setting in what should be their golden, easy years; but luckily tons of people are catching on about these well-mannered pups! They already have years of training under their belts and are just looking for a comfy home to spend the rest of their lives in while giving all their love to whomever is lucky enough to rescue them!”
Over the past 13 years, the national nonprofit Grey Muzzle Organization has provided more than $3.1 million in grants to support its vision of “a world where no old dog dies alone and afraid.”
“Thanks to the generosity of our donors, we’re delighted to help deserving organizations like Austin Pets Alive! make a difference in the lives of dogs and people in their communities,” Grey Muzzle’s Executive Director Lisa Lunghofer said. “Many senior dogs in the Austin Area are enjoying their golden years in loving homes thanks to the wonderful work of APA!.”
Presented by Austin Subaru, this unique annual fundraiser benefits the Parvo Puppy ICU Program at Austin Pets Alive! which has pioneered the path to give puppies with parvo a fighting chance.
Austin Pets Alive!’s Parvo Puppy ICU is the first of its kind in the nation and has saved over 5,500 puppies since its creation in 2008. On average, they continue to save around 600 puppies each year. Even with the pandemic happening, in 2020 this amazing team saved 609 puppies! Parvo, short for the canine parvovirus, is a highly contagious viral illness, and often means immediate and absolute euthanasia for puppies.
This is where APA! comes in. Our Parvo Puppy ICU provides an alternative to euthanasia and gives the puppies who were on death’s doorstep a real chance at life. With proper treatment, parvo takes about a week to cure. Post-parvo, these pups are finally given a chance at adoption to lead a healthy, normal life. We love seeing updates from our adopters who watch as their small parvo puppies grow into big and strong dogs. Check out sweet Bodie’s transformation after he was released from the ICU!
Now you have the chance to help pioneer change for our pups, too! Grab your friends and family and hop in a kayak, canoe, or SUP the weekend of May 7-9 for the 10th Annual Paddle for Puppies.
Unfortunately, due to the recent surge of algae in the water, we’re suggesting pets stay at home this year. No need to fear — you’re still sure to have a paw-some time!
In compliance with CDC guidelines, we will not be paddling as a large group, but instead have extended the paddling experience over three days. The paddle will begin at 4:00 pm at Rowing Dock on May 7 and end at 8:00 pm. May 8-9, the paddle will begin at 8:00 am and end at 12:00 pm at the same location.
Last year was anything but traditional, with Paddle for Puppies being virtual. This year we want to see you! Come out to Lady Bird Lake and have a nice, relaxing time, all while making a splash in our Parvo Puppy Program!
Be sure to buy your tickets now! We’re absolutely paw-sitive you won’t want to miss out on this fun-filled paddling experience!
Special thanks to Austin Subaru for sponsoring Paddle for Puppies for 10 years, and to Rowing Dock for hosting us once again!
All photos used are from the 2019 Paddle for Puppies with accreditation to Austin Subaru.
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