New Owensboro restaurant hopes to Lure in customers | News

OWENSBORO, KY (WFIE)- There were two major announcements on Wednesday about the hotel and convention center in Downtown Owensboro.

A river-view restaurant is going inside the hotel and a safety agreement has been reached on the convention center.

If you drive through Downtown Owensboro, you'll see work has hit high gear on both projects, and the work hits milestones for both.

Hotel developer Malcolm Bryant's 150 room, seven story hotel is going vertical.

"Be the tallest structure in Downtown Owensboro. We'll be pouring the second floor in the next seven to ten days, so yes it's going fast," Bryant said.

The hotel is also getting a seafood and grille restaurant called Lure. Current Famous Bistro Restaurant owner George Skiadas will open Lure.

"We want to create a restaurant that people will find as a destination. We want them to come from Central City, Evansville. There will be a full service bar," Skiadas said.

"We'll have everything form catfish fiddlers to jumbo shrimp cocktail. Will have accordion glass windows so that we can in fact make the entire restaurant an open air restaurant," said Ben Skiadas, Lure manager.

Meanwhile, the convention center will soon go vertical, too. On Wednesday, Denark Construction signed a safety agreement with the Kentucky Labor Cabinet.

"It's a proactive approach to safety for our project as opposed to OCEA coming here for the wrong reasons. Everybody comes to the job site with an attitude of safety," said Gordon Knapp with Denark Construction.

Denark Construction officials say the December 2013 deadline for opening looks good even with a few setbacks.

"The subsurface conditions of this project have been very difficult to deal with. We're almost through that and once we get up and out of the dirt, so to say, then we're sort of in control of our destiny," Knapp said.

Bryant expects to have an announcement on a new retail space around his hotel coming soon.

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