Award-winning chef plans restaurant, gastropub, 39-room hotel in historic Boise building

If you’re a graying Boise music fan, you smile and remember it as the Bouquet, a smoky, street-level bar that rocked downtown for decades.

If you’re an Idaho history buff, you know the empty, four-story structure as the Averyl Building — or by the faded ghost sign on its side: Hotel Manitou.

Lately, though, maybe you’re like me. Maybe you just think of 1010 Main St. as a sad shame.

Cal Elliott hopes to change that.

A Boise native who spent 28 years as a New York City chef, he plans to make the former Bouquet space bloom again. His project’s design review application, submitted to the city of Boise this week, pays homage to the building’s storied past.

The new vision is called the Avery Hotel: two restaurants on the ground floor, and a 39-room hotel above it. (Yes, Avery Hotel, dropping the “l,” not Averyl.) Simply put, it would be fresh life for the early-1900s building — a relevance it hasn’t enjoyed for more than half a century. (Even when it was your great-grandpa’s movie hangout, the Granada Theatre. Or Boz Theatre. Or whatever he remembers it being.)

When the final, weak iteration of the Bouquet staggered to a close five years ago — a club called the Ice Bouquet — the structure was best described as dilapidated. Back in the early ’00s, I remember friends fondly referring to the Bouquet as “the Bucket.” As far as I know, it had nothing to do with the fact that buckets sometimes have been used to catch rainwater in the building.

After buying it in 2015, Elliott began addressing the property’s neglect with his business partners.

“We’ve done a lot of work on it,” he says. “We’ve put a whole new roof on it and done some structural upgrades to it. We’ve just been exploring the building and getting to know it.

“It’s been a process,” he continues. “I have not been detoured from my original concept, which was to bring it back as a hotel — because it was originally a hotel.”

His determination is laudable. The restoration requires more than just elbow grease.

“We’re doing an historic renovation,” Elliott says, ”so we’re going for federal tax credits. We’re doing all the renovations through the historic guidelines, which is a difficult thing to do. We’re being very conscious of what we do, and very thoughtful of where it is on the west side of Main, and historic Main Street.”

Elliott went to Borah High School. In 1993, he moved to New York to begin a long, successful culinary career. As an opening chef at now-defunct Dressler in Brooklyn, he helped earn a Michelin Star for the fine-dining destination. For a decade, Elliott operated his own Williamsburg restaurant, Rye — a Michelin Bib Gourmand pick — before closing it in 2018. Boise beckoned. He now lives here full-time.

Elliott’s food-and-drink plan at the Avery Hotel is twofold. He envisions a Main Street restaurant in the former Bouquet space. A second eatery — a gastropub — would have an alley entryway.

I know what you’re wondering, Bouquet alumni. Yes, the gorgeous Brunswick back bar that gave the nightclub so much character will remain, Elliott promises.

Bottom line? We might not see that mahogany beauty for a while.

There is no timeline on the opening of the Avery Hotel.

“Just say it’s going to happen,” Elliott tells me.

You got it, chef.

Oh, and know one thing: Boise is rooting for you.

This story was originally published January 31, 2020 at 12:41 PM.