East Downtown restaurants see World Cup foot traffic improve, worries ease

East Downtown’s FIFA Fan Festival had drawn more than 163,000 visitors by Tuesday, and nearby restaurants were starting to see the kind of traffic many owners expected when Houston landed World Cup games. In EaDo, the question is no longer whether fans will come, but which businesses can capture them.

At J-Bar-M Barbecue, a few blocks from Shell Energy Stadium, manager Hoffie Ferreira said the first couple of days were not as busy as expected and the business worried early on. The picture improved as the festival continued, helped by the Houston World Cup host committee’s local push to steer fans toward nearby shops and restaurants.

That promotion, called Football Fiesta, signed up 23 businesses and gave bars and restaurants another way to reach fans coming to watch matches near the stadium. For operators in East Downtown, that matters because the World Cup’s payoff depends on more than a packed fan zone. It also turns on whether a business is visible, easy to reach and in the path of people walking between the festival, restaurants and watch parties.

Houston’s official fan festival at 2301 Dallas St. runs from June 11 to July 19 and is free to the public. FIFA guidance for the Houston site advises fans to use public transportation, while noting parking options around the perimeter. That mix of transit, parking and road access has made the neighborhood experience uneven, with some restaurants catching spillover business and others still waiting for the promised lift.

The scale of the citywide event explains why owners were watching closely. Before the tournament, Houston was expected to welcome more than 500,000 visitors over a three-week span from June 14 to July 4, and the city is hosting seven World Cup matches. A Houston Public Media story on June 16 said thousands of fans were already in Houston at NRG Stadium, the East Downtown fan festival or watch parties around town, showing that EaDo is only one piece of a much larger visitor economy.

The early results suggest that the World Cup is reaching Houston small businesses, but not evenly. Restaurants closest to the fan traffic are beginning to see more lunch and dinner orders, while places farther from the main pedestrian routes are still waiting for the tournament to translate into receipts.