Down in the lower levels of the W.T. Waggoner Building, the 20-story tower that has stood at 810 Houston St. in downtown Fort Worth since 1920, there is an old bank vault. When Musume moved in, the owners lined it with tatami and made it a private dining room. When the restaurant reopens in early November, that vault will still be there, intact, after nearly three years in which very little else down there was.
Musume first opened in Fort Worth in June 2023, inside the newly restored Sandman Signature Hotel. It was the second location for Josh Babb and Sean Clavir, the Rock Libations partners who opened the original on Flora Street in the Dallas Arts District in January 2018. Babb spent years running Kenichi in Dallas before that, and the Fort Worth room had his fingerprints on it: fish flown in from Japan, a sake list built to impress, and tableside ramen for the people who just wanted noodles.
It was open about six months. On the afternoon of Monday, January 8, 2024, an explosion ripped through the basement of the hotel, blew out the lower floors and threw debris across the street. Twenty-one people were injured, three of them Musume employees. The restaurant was closed to guests at the time, and Babb said that day that no diners were inside.
Investigators found characteristics of a natural gas explosion, but no official cause was ever announced, and the federal investigation has since been closed. People who were hurt, Musume staff among them, filed lawsuits that are still unresolved. That part of the story is not finished, and it deserves to be told carefully when it is.
The restaurant, at least, is coming back to the same address.
The number worth paying attention to is 90. More than 90 percent of Musume’s original Fort Worth staff is returning, according to the restaurant. Anyone who has worked a dining room knows how unusual that is. Crews drift apart after a few dark months. After almost three years, most people have new jobs, new cities and new lives. These came back anyway.
Babb and Clavir called the reopening deeply personal in a statement, and said they came away from the closure with “a sense of unfinished business.” Given who is walking back through the door with them, it reads less like marketing and more like a promise kept to their own people.
The kitchen belongs to executive chef Chris Conlon, a Culinary Institute of America graduate whose résumé runs through the Hakkasan Group and Charlie Palmer’s Aureole. He is no stranger to this project. Before the first Fort Worth opening in 2023, Conlon was the Musume culinary director talking about Japanese-leaning breakfasts and weekend breakfast sushi, a rare thing for a downtown hotel restaurant.
The new menu keeps the core idea and pushes it further. Sushi and sashimi will be flown in daily from Japan. The omakase grows to nine courses, up from the six- and eight-course formats Musume has offered before, and there will be dishes made only for Fort Worth. The original menu leaned on things like black cod misozuke, steamed buns, the Superfly vegan roll and that tableside ramen. The restaurant has not said which of those return, so consider it a question worth asking your server.
The drinks program is where the growth shows most. When Musume first opened here, it carried more than 50 sake labels. The new list runs past 120, alongside more than 60 Japanese whiskies, which the restaurant says makes both collections the largest in the city.
The 5,000-square-foot space has been redesigned with warm wood millwork, custom murals and a new lobby lounge finished in Italian marble. The restaurant describes the new look as brighter and more modern than the first. Then there is the vault, which made it through all of this and keeps its job as the tatami room.
The building above it carries its own weight. W.T. Waggoner, the rancher behind one of the largest spreads in Texas, put his name on the tower, and for a time it was the tallest building in the state. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and it spent years as office space before the hotel conversion. The Sandman says on its website that the hotel will reopen in 2026 but has not announced a date. Either way, Musume’s return puts a light back on at the bottom of a block downtown has spent a long time walking around.
Musume is set to reopen in early November at 810 Houston St. in downtown Fort Worth. An exact date has not been announced, so check the restaurant’s site before you go. The name, for the record, is the Japanese word for daughter.
