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Brooke Humphries is a busy woman. As we stand just outside the entrance of It’ll Do Club on Elm Street, she fields questions from Red Bull reps and contractors: “You have two minutes of my time,” she says to one of them. “You have one minute of my time,” she says to the other.
Divide and conquer. This approach is how she manages to juggle Barcadia and Beauty Bar, her two Henderson clubs; a new restaurant called Acme (with chefs Jeana Johnson and Colleen O’Hare of Good 2 Go Taco and Goodfriend), set to open on McKinney next week; the revamping of It’ll Do with business partner Brianna Larson, set to open June 16; and a new coffee shop called Mudsmith, which will open on Greenville in August. That’s in addition to promoting events like Meltdown with Jeremy Word.
Humphries leads me through the interior of It’ll Do, which has been in Deep Ellum since the mid-1940s, the smell of new plywood and sound of buzzsaws filling the space. “We’re going for a Boogie Nights feel,” she says. “There will be LED lights on the [dance floor], wood paneling on the walls, bleachers for seating along the wall here. None of this roped-off bottle service crap. At this place, we don’t care how much money you have. If you want a drink, you walk to the bar.”
When it opens on Saturday, June 16, It’ll Do will host DJs Miguel Migs and Lisa Shaw. Humphries says house music will be the predominant soundtrack, and for the first month they’ll be open just on Saturdays, “and then we’ll branch out to some Fridays and maybe some off nights.” She also says It’ll Do will cater to the 21-45 crowd. “No one under 21. They can go to Lizard Lounge.”
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All of Humphries’ new business ventures really spring from a central idea, which applies to many new spots in town, like Good 2 Go Taco and Goodfriend. “A restaurant on Peavy and Garland? That’s no-man’s land,” she says. “But now that place is packed every weekend. It used to be people in Dallas wouldn’t leave a five-block radius. Now, if you give Dallas the product, they will drive to the product.”
