Jimmy Buffett announced today that he’ll be returning to Paris again in 2011.

He’ll take his show to The Olympia on Monday, September 26th!

Tickets go on sale Wednesday, December 15th through gdp.fr.

As we reported last month, Jimmy Buffett will appear on The Today Show this month. The date? Christmas Eve (Dec. 24th).

Joining Jimmy will be Robert Greenidge and the rest of the Coral Reefer Band. They’ll perform “Winter Wonderland” from Robert’s “A Coral Reefer Christmas”.

A Coral Reefer Christmas is a collection of holiday songs by Robert Greenidge, along with other members of the Coral Reefer Band. Jimmy and Nadirah provide guest vocals for “Winter Wonderland” on the album.

Preview the tracks and get the album at Amazon for just $7.99.

Welcome to a new feature… videos from the vault. Every few days we’ll post a video from our Video Gallery. Here at Buffett World we have by far the most extensive Jimmy Buffett video gallery, including lots of old television appearances.

For our first video, here’s a very animated Jimmy performing “Great Heart” on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson from October 13th, 1988:

Ken Hoffman of the Houston Chronicle attended Monday night’s private show for American Express platinum cardholders at the Toyota Center. In a review of the concert, he explains how it wasn’t your typical Buffett show. ” I’d never been to a rock show with commercial breaks before.”

American Express e-mailed two free tickets to local platinum-card holders as a thank-you for years of paying their bill on time. It was a very platinum-looking crowd, too, not Buffett’s regular throng of Hawaiian-shirt-wearing pretend beach bums and surfer girls.

When we entered Toyota Center, there was a sign, “Food and soft drinks are complimentary.” American Express picked up the bill for all the hot dogs, hamburgers, chicken tenders, soft drinks and pizza. I should have told Garfield to meet me in front of Toyota Center. Beer was not free. People in line at the concession stand ordered “two hot dogs (free), two hamburgers (free), three sodas (free), popcorn (free), peanuts (free) … and one beer ($7.50).” On average, it was a pretty good deal.

Buffett is a huge star, especially in Houston. If this were a normal concert, with normal ticket sales, the place would have been packed, every seat filled to the top row, front and back. American Express blocked off the entire upper deck and behind the stage Monday night. American Express gave away 7,500 tickets, hoping to present an intimate concert event.

There were empty seats throughout the lower bowl. Some rows, including mine, were less than half-filled. I figure maybe 6,000 people were inside the 19,000-capacity Toyota Center.

Buffett usually walks onstage without a formal introduction. The fans know who he is. Monday night, an American Express spokeswoman welcomed the crowd and introduced Buffett with a weird flowery speech and commercial for American Express.

Buffett opened with two songs from his country album, License to Thrill. Then he launched into a story about having lunch with his distant relative Warren Buffett – one of the few people in the world with more money than Jimmy Buffett. Jimmy said Warren told him that he judges America’s economic strength by how many people are paying for things with their American Express credit card. Buffett mentioned American Express throughout the concert.

He did everything but use an American Express credit card to slice and dice potatoes “faster than a food processor!”

There was no intermission, like a regular Buffett show. The fans didn’t know how to do “fins to the left, fins to the right,” during the closing song. And for his encore, he did a rocked-out Brown-Eyed Girl instead of an acoustic ballad.

There were no tables selling T-shirts in the lobby. I saw only one beach ball being batted about in the audience.

And Houston area parrotheads… Hoffman says that Buffett hinted that he’d be back in the Spring.

Jimmy Buffett is expanding his business empire once again, this time opening another restaurant in Myrtle Beach. There’s already a Margaritaville Cafe in the resort town, but the Sun News announced today that Buffett will open a Land Shark Bar & Grill at the SkyWheel attraction in May:

The 3,000-square-foot restaurant will have mostly outdoor seating, said David Busker, president of Koch Development, which will operate the SkyWheel and is developing it along with Pacific Development. Busker declined to talk about the restaurant’s concept.

Officials are staying tight-lipped about the restaurant. Al Mers, a partner in Pacific Development, said this afternoon that he couldn’t comment about the restaurant until Dec. 15. The Myrtle Beach Community Appearance Board likely will consider the restaurant’s sign requests during its Dec. 16 meeting.

There’s a Land Shark Landing restaurant in Pensacola, Fla., beside the Margaritaville Beach Hotel that serves items such as fish tacos, nachos and, of course, a Cheeseburger in Paradise fixed the way Buffett describes in the song by the same name. It’s unclear whether the Land Shark Bar & Grille in Myrtle Beach will serve similar food.

The restaurant will be part of the $12 million to $15 million SkyWheel complex emerging on the oceanfront. Crews are installing the 106 pilings that will support the nearly 200-foot-high Ferris wheel, which will have 42 glass enclosed, temperature-controlled gondolas that plan to operate year-round.

The Land Shark restaurant will bring a different kind of venue to downtown Myrtle Beach that will lure Buffett’s followers who are likely to check out downtown’s other offerings after stopping by the new restaurant, said Dave Sebok, executive director of Myrtle Beach’s Downtown Redevelopment Corp.

“It will offer something that is obviously new and has a different theme to it than what we have on the oceanfront now,” he said. “It’s a name that is nationally and internationally known so to me it’s likely to be able to attract customers and business downtown.”

Read the full story here.