A New Downtown Tulsa Restaurant

A new downtown restaurant is in the works and this one might have the best view of downtown yet. <br/><br/>News on 6 business reporter Steve Berg says it is not so much the location of the building, it's

Tuesday, June 27th 2006, 1:03 pm

By: News On 6

A new downtown restaurant is in the works and this one might have the best view of downtown yet.

News on 6 business reporter Steve Berg says it is not so much the location of the building, it's the fact, they'll have seats on the roof.

Restaurateur Elliott Nelson is used to a challenge. "Every time we do something the city kind of grimaces when we walk in the door, because everything we do needs to be completely engineered, completely redone and they're all hundred-year-old buildings." Nelson has become a kind of mini mogul when it comes to downtown.

He started with McNellie's Pub a couple of years ago and then continued recently with the Continental next door. Now he aims to turn the former Bad Girls Bar into an upscale Mexican restaurant called El Guapo. "Well, y'know, I've been working on it for a while. We've been looking at this building for about a year trying to figure out what to do with it." What he wants to do hasn't been done downtown or anywhere in Tulsa that he can think of rooftop seating. â€œIf you go to any major city in the Southwest, you see all these rooftop bars and especially in the downtown and urban areas, just with the view and everything else it makes sense."

It will be a challenge, both from an engineering and from a permitting standpoint, but he says the city is getting better at playing along. "Y'know with McNellie's, it took us 4-and-a-half months to get a building permit, with the Continental, it was 2-and-a-half months and with this one, we'll just kind of wait and see but."

He says the success of McNellie's has created more believers. "When I built McNellie's, everybody thought I was crazy and told me it was going to fail and it was too big and it was the wrong place and what was I thinking and it was impossible to find a bank that would give me the money and now there are several banks that I can get the money from and several people asking what Iâ€™m going to do next."

Next, they start renovating. He hopes the restaurant will be ready to go next spring.