“We just wanted to just to start something fresh, something new,” says Victoria Dunham Gaspar of the decision to re-vamp Pipa in favour of a new look, new menu and new name—The Brown Hound (named for an actual brown hound names Jones).
“Portuguese and Brazilian was a hard sell in Halifax,” she says. “After four years we finally put nachos and a burger on the menu last summer and that’s all we sold for weeks.” But the Brown Hound, which she says has been in the works for a while, will keep some of Pipa’s best parts intact—there’ll still be salsa dancing on Fridays and Saturdays, you’ll still find chicken piri piri, cheese bread and some of its popular fish dishes on the menu and the atrium will remain as is, ready for your weekend brunching.
But things will looks a little more rustic. And you’ll also find more meat dishes than Pipa had, like a build your own spaghetti option (you choose the meatball and the sauce type) and an Argentinian Milanesa, as well as more pastas, fresh fish and an extended cocktail selection. “It gives us more room to play,” says Dunham Gaspar, adding that there’ll be frequently changing specials as well.
The brand new Brown Hound will be ready for you to sit, and stay, next week.
This article appears in Jun 5-11, 2014.
Was it that Portuguese and Brazilian was a hard sell or was it that your food was – at least in my experience terrible. Flavor profile? Watery. Fresh? Apprently not: Comically, the server inadvertently informed us that the food was anything but fresh in the process of defending it (‘it was made fresh on Sunday!’ she let us know, for a meal we were eating on Tuesday). Flavor profile: water. And on top of all that, it was an *expensive* awful meal.
Food inspection results make a person wonder if there isn’t something else at work in the name change:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/…
Salient bit: “At Pipa Restaurant and Bar in Halifax, they’ve been cited six times in the past year for lack of trained staff.”
I hope that the staff have had better training. I actually liked the food at Pipa – except the piri piri which is why I find it shocking that that’s one of few things they’d keep on the menu! I knew that Pipa was going to close the last time I was there and saw the horrible menu changes they had made, and that on top of it, several of the items on the menu were not available, there was ONE waiter for the whole restaurant and a girl in training who was filling water. After 1.5 hours of not getting a single morsel of food, I went to have a chat with the waiter, and was told, “in fairness, you didn’t have a reservation.” Hello clueless!! A reservation is about whether there is room for us in your restaurant. Once you’ve seated us, you do NOT proceed to feed all the people who have come in after us and complete ignore us! Please Victoria please, train your staff and improve your menu. I really want to be able to support this place.