Two popular downtown Birmingham restaurants are getting closer to opening new locations in neighboring Homewood.
El Barrio, a Mexican-inspired restaurant famous for its chorizo meatloaf, masa roasted trout and al pastor tacos, and Paramount, a casual restaurant and bar known for its hot wings, cold beers and two-fisted burgers, are expected to open in June in the new West Row residential and commercial development in West Homewood.
The two restaurants anchor the West Row commercial space at 195 Oxmoor Road.
El Barrio occupies the east side of the building and Paramount the west, with a long hallway filled with arcade games that ties the two restaurants together.
The expansion into Homewood, and specifically West Homewood, is a logical next step for El Barrio and Paramount, the restaurants’ owners say.
“This is an awesome, growing, thriving area,” Geoff Lockert, one of the restaurants’ co-owners, tells AL.com. “We love downtown, but we wanted to try something new.”
Tom Walker of Village Creek Development first approached Lockert and his partners Brian Somershield, Neville Baay and Ben Smith about opening second locations of El Barrio and Paramount -- and putting them together under the same roof -- more than three years ago.
Walker, a Homewood resident and a fan of both restaurants, felt they would be the perfect fit for his West Row project.
“In the real estate world in Birmingham, if you’re going to have a project and you want to be successful, you’ve got to really focus on family,” Walker says. “And I think these guys are some of the best operators in town.”
The mixed-use West Row development -- which includes 51 two- and three-bedroom townhomes, as well as 18 lofts above the two restaurants -- is on the site of the old Econo Lodge hotel, which was demolished in 2023 to clear the way for construction.
Village Creek Development unveiled plans for the $32.5-million, 98,000-square-foot project in October 2023. Poole & Company Architects designed the project.
The West Row name reflects the sense of pride that the people who live in West Homewood feel in their neighborhood, Walker adds.
“The West Homewood neighborhood very much embraces being West Homewood,” he says. “They like the idea of being the Homewood of the West.
“So we decided to wrap our arms around that and embrace it. And then, we have rows of townhomes, so that’s how (West Row) came about.”
The residential units began leasing earlier this spring.
From urban to suburban
Somershield says that when he and his restaurant partners opened the original Paramount more than a decade ago, they envisioned it as an “above-21 arcade/food/bar concept” that would stay open until late at night.
But when the COVID-19 pandemic caused them to pivot and reduce their hours, the demographics started to shift.
“It just kind of became, especially on the weekends, a lot more of a family-centric place,” Somershield says.
The opportunity to take that concept to suburban Homewood was too good to pass up.
“We felt this is something that families really enjoy,” Somershield says, “and we thought it would do really well in the suburbs. . . .
“And, of course, El Barrio, we’re confident that, with the addition of the access to the arcade, we’ll attract more of a family clientele there, as well.”
Somershield and Lockert, best friends since they met playing youth baseball in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, worked together for Birmingham restaurateurs Frank and Pardis Stitt at Chez Fonfon – Somershield as a sous chef and Lockert as a server – before opening their first restaurant together, the Italian café Trattoria Centrale, on 20th Street North downtown in 2009.
Two years later, they partnered with Baay, a New Zealand native who moved to Alabama and became a private chef, to open their Mexican restaurant El Barrio (Spanish for “the neighborhood”) on Second Avenue North.
Then, on New Year’s Eve 2013, Somershield, Lockert, Baay and Smith, the El Barrio bar manager, teamed to open the original Paramount restaurant and bar in the former Paramount yogurt shop space at the corner of 20th Street and Second Avenue North.
(In 2015, Somershield and Lockert sold their original restaurant, Trattoria Centrale, to two of their longtime employees.)
Learning from experience
So, the four restaurateurs bring more than a decade and a half of lessons learned into opening the new locations of Paramount and El Barrio in West Homewood.
“We were able to address -- through 10, 15 years of running businesses -- things were like, ‘Man, if only we could change this,’ or, ‘If only we could add that,’’’ Somershield says.
On the El Barrio side, for instance, they added a private dining room that will seat about 25 guests and be available for sales meetings and special occasions.
And on the Paramount side, they have installed enough big-screen TVs – 17 – to ensure every guest will have their pick of every NFL game that’s available on Sundays.
“Now we’re not gonna have somebody complaining that one of the NFL games is not on TV,” Lockert says.
Both restaurants also have much larger and more efficient kitchens than their original counterparts.
“The biggest differences that we made probably were in the back of the house for both sides and having more space in the kitchen area,” Somershield says.
“It’s a great problem to have, but we outgrew both of our kitchens (downtown), so the things that people won’t see (in West Homewood) are probably going to benefit us most from an efficiency standpoint.”
Baay, who oversees catering for El Barrio, will also have a designated kitchen for catering orders.
“Neville, with all the catering that he does at El Barrio, was able to design a catering kitchen here where we’ll be able to take on more catering and do it in a way that probably isn’t stressing out the kitchen quite as much as it does downtown,” Somershield says.
New spaces, same dishes
The new Paramount space features many of the same design elements as the downtown location, incorporating vintage license plates, car wheels and industrial lighting to give the bar and dining area the look of a garage and a nostalgic vibe.
The restaurant, which seats 94 guests, also opens out onto a fenced-in outdoor green space with tiered seating and an artificial turf lawn where kids can play while their parents hang out at Paramount.
“The idea is it’s fenced in and secure, and your mom and dad can focus on socializing and watching the game, and the kids are outside on the green space or inside at the arcade,” Walker, the developer, says.
The breezy El Barrio dining room also seats 94 guests, including a custom-built circular family-style table with a lazy Susan in the center that seats six to eight guests.
Birmingham mixed-media artist Kevin Booth, who previously worked as a server at El Barrio for 13 years, designed the colorful mural above the banquette that runs the length of the main wall.
“He’s an artist, and he’s given that a go -- to just be a professional artist,” Lockert says. “So when we wanted to do a mural, we reached out to him.”
Another former El Barrio server, Jeff O’Neil, built some of the tables for both restaurants.
“(They are) just really good people,” Lockert says of Booth and O’Neil. “It’s awesome to keep the family going, even though they’re doing other things.”
The menus at both restaurants will be the same as those at the downtown locations – at least for now.
Baay, though, hopes to soon offer a more expansive Sunday brunch menu at the new El Barrio with “some cool, unique things that we don’t do the rest of the week,” he says.
The new locations of El Barrio and Paramount are at 195 Oxmoor Road in Homewood, Ala. For more information on El Barrio, go here. For more information about Paramount, go here.