The Bishop Arts Winery, which Oak Cliff resident Elias Rodriguez has been planning since last January, could open as soon as the end of December. At the latest, the winery is expected to open in January.

Rodriguez has been open, serving coffee and bagels for several months while he waits for approval so sell and manufacture wine.

The shop, in a former art gallery at Davis and Tyler, will specialize in Texas wines. Rodriguez, who has worked in German wineries, plans to make wine at the shop as well. His vision is similar to Times Ten Cellars.

Rodriguez has hired chef Ericka Vazquez, who once worked under chef Sharon Hage at Salve. Vazquez also worked as a grill cook at the Oceanaire and Craft Dallas. Her resume as a cook is a who’s who of upscale Dallas restaurants, but Bishop Arts Winery is the first kitchen that is all hers.

She is planning a menu that includes a cheese board, soup, salad and desserts. The menu isn’t final yet, and they haven’t decided whether to offer entrees. But I tried Vazquez’s delicious beef and vegetable soup the other day (they have free wifi and good coffee), and I have high hopes for her menu.

OC Smokehouse, on Davis at Clinton, was locked and boarded up Thursday night.

The barbecue restaurant opened in a converted gas station as Luckie’s Smokehouse in February, the same month Lockhart Smokehouse opened a few blocks away.

The owners sued each other this summer, and Luckie’s closed for awhile, but owner Naht Ngo reopened as OC Smokehouse soon after, with basically the same menu.

Here comes the booze. A year after Dallas voted to make Oak Cliff wet, beer and wine stores are cropping up on West Davis.

Dan Beer and Wine opened last week on West Davis at Polk.

When I visited, they didn’t have their wine selection in stock yet, but the beer selection was pretty good. They have one full cooler of local and craft beers. That cooler also contained Rheingold, which I thought was interesting since I don’t recall seeing it in Dallas before, and it is neither craft nor local. Is it the new Pabst, the beer cool kids drink because it’s ironic? Anyway, we bought New Belgium Snow Day. It cost $8.99 for six.

Another store, North Oak Cliff Beer and Wine, is coming soon to the space on West Davis at Clinton, adjacent to Urban Acres. North Oak Cliff Beer & Wine is opening on the same block as Chelsmati’s Wine Market, which Oak Cliff resident Tina Acosta opened in July.

Look at this house:

David Spence of Good Space had to look at it for years. Years! As it is right next door to his office on West Eighth Street in the Bishop Arts District. Spence makes a living renovating and managing Oak Cliff properties, and he hated looking at this sad little house, so well located and full of potential, yet so unattainable.

He once made an offer on the house, but the absentee landlords shot him down. Then finally, finally, the house went on the market last year, and boy, did Spence swoop in to buy that sucker in a hurry.

Look at it now:

It’s what we Texans call “darling.” Spence and Good Space turned the house into an office, and they leased it to a law firm pretty quickly. Wouldn’t that be a nice place to work, even if you had to be a lawyer?

Spence started renovating old properties in Oak Cliff back in the mid-90s, when I still considered Oak Cliff the place to go for thrift stores and getting car jacked. The Old Oak Cliff Conservation League honored Spence this week with the 2011 Ruth Chenowith Conservation Achievement Award for his work on Eighth Street. And it’s well deserved.

He also renovated this darling little house on West Eighth, which is available for lease as office space:

Currently, he is working on another Eighth Street house, and it looks a mess:

Just wait. It will be as darling as the rest.

Oak Cliff resident Rick Garza has unveiled his plans for a mixed-use development he calls Kings Way. Garza, an architect who owns several rental properties in the neighborhood, bought the 1.75-acre tract on West Davis at Vernon, across the street from Sweet 200, in 2008.

The new Omni Dallas Hotel, just across the river from Oak Cliff, should be a winner for Dallas and a boost for Oak Cliff shops and restaurants.

This is the first hotel in Dallas to be directly connected to the convention center, via above-ground, air-conditioned walkways. The hope is that many more conventioneers will be in Dallas in the future.

In addition to the ever-changing light show on the exterior of the Omni, the interior contains some wonderful surprises. Works by local artists are featured in the common areas and local food is sold in the gift store (a shout-out to Oak Cliff’s own Dude, Sweet Chocolate). And I can’t wait to go to a meeting at the Oak Cliff, Bishop Arts or Fair Park Rooms. But the highlight is a view of downtown Dallas from the pool deck at night. Even if the exterior lighting of the Omni is not on, you have a 180 degree view of downtown Dallas, from the Reunion sparkly ball to the Flying Red Horse. If you are lucky enough to be there when the exterior lights are reflecting off the buildings that border the Omni, it’s quite an experience to be enveloped by that light show.

As the Dallas weather changes, you may want to try the Owners Box sports bar. With more than 70 TV screens and some incredible-sounding cocktails, this could turn into the next “scene” in Dallas. For the more laid-back, there is Bob’s Steak & Chop House. Prediction: This hotel will rejuvenate downtown.

Matador Meat & Wine is the second business announced for the Sylvan | Thirty development.

The Plano-based Matador sells “only the highest quality” beef, according to its website, and butchers cut the beef to order. Matador also offers pork, sausage and chicken, as well as free-range beef, raised without artificial hormones or antibiotics.

The shop offers more than 75 wine labels and home delivery.

Matador will occupy a 3,000-square-foot space connected to anchor tenant Cox Farms Market.

The prolonged drought hasn’t caused a Dallas water crisis yet, but the City has decided to be cautious by instituting Stage 1 water restrictions beginning Dec. 12. The regulations affect both residential and commercial water users in Dallas.

The DMN reported the story this weekend, but if you aren’t a subscriber, the basics are in this document available on the City’s savedallaswater.com website. Here are the basics: We can’t water lawns more than twice a week, and the allowable days are listed in the rules. There’s a time limit to watering, too: 6 p.m. to 10 a.m. Make a mistake, and you’re entitled to receive a written warning the first time and at least a $250 fine (and up to a $2,000 fine) the next violation. Continued violations could result in more fines or even a “flow restrictor” placed on the water line to help keep you in line.

Most of us likely won’t be seriously impacted by the new regulations, particularly in the winter off-season. However, there are some big waterers in Dallas who have been highlighted in the DMN and on the TV stations (guys like Tom Hicks, for example) and who use a lot of water on probably a lot of days. Whether the water police will be watching those guys is yet to be determined, but I imagine in this age of ubiquitous video cameras in phones and online squealing, there’s a pretty good chance we’ll be hearing lots more about this in the weeks ahead.

Cretia’s, the bakery that took over the old Nodding Dog space at Bishop and Seventh almost three years ago, has moved to a smaller space across the street, near Lockhart Smokehouse.

Cretia’s vacated the larger space so that it could be turned into a wine bar with outdoor seating and TVs for watching sports. It looks like they are under construction installing counter tops at the windows, similar to what Oddfellows has. An alcohol permit was filed in August.

This is not surprising. The retail space at the southwest corner of West Davis and Polk is going to be a “beer store.” It looks like there’s still quite a bit of construction left to go inside.

This is the building that used to be painted blue, and the sign used to announce antiques and tobacco, which I always found amusing. Once the antiques and tobacco place closed, and the wet/dry referendum passed, we guessed this might be a convenient place for a “beer store.” By the way, does anyone call it a “beer store” outside of Texas? Is that a Southern thing?