Imagine the marketing challenge of updating a restaurant where a cult movie about a cannibalistic family was filmed.
But Simon Madera and his fellow investors saw an opportunity when they bought the Grand Central Café, a Central Texas restaurant that was one of the settings for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).
Embracing the building’s past, they renamed the Kingsland restaurant Hooper’s, in honor of Tobe Hooper, the late Texas filmmaker who directed the horror classic. He died in 2017.
“We’re absolutely, 100% leaning into it,” Mandera said. “There’s a lot of delicate pieces that we’re adding to the place to pay homage to the movie.”
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Madera, who was behind the Taco Flats franchise chain in the 512 area code, joined with his wife, Hobie Sasser, and Courtney and Mike Rhodes, all from Austin, in acquiring the Grand Central Café in November.
At first, Madera wasn’t familiar with the century-old Victorian-era house’s cultural heritage. In the movie, a group of teenagers falls prey to a clan of cannibals, including the notorious chainsaw-wielding Leatherface. Hooper, an Austin native, filmed some of the more gruesome scenes in the house.
The house originally stood near rural Round Rock. In 1998, as Round Rock was seeing development, the structure — a pattern-book house that could be broken into pieces — was disassembled into nine parts and transported about 60 miles away to the Antlers Inn resort in Kingsland. It was reassembled with a white porch and other finer touches.
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