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…