Temporary Restaurants - Now You See It, Now You Don't
JOHN FRASER’S new restaurant is doomed. It may make a splash at the start, but by this time next year it will be over, done with, kaput.
At least if you take him at his word.
For his follow-up to Dovetail, an elegant success on the Upper West Side, Mr. Fraser has chosen a project with a death foretold. He signed a short-term lease for a space in SoHo whose landlord cannot promise that the building, likely to be demolished, will be around past July. In return he received a rent of about $9,000 a month, well below market rate.
He was also freed from many of the little and big concerns that can turn the opening of a restaurant into such a protracted odyssey and the running of it into such an expensive one.
Because he’s not fashioning a keeper, he can — and must — keep his investment low. He’s not paying for, or bothering with, a proper sign out front. The dozens of chairs, used, were bought on eBay for under $10 each, and if they’re not so durable, no sweat.
The bar, a mobile cart, will be stocked with only one brand of each spirit, and on a given night there will be just two whites, two reds and one sparkling wine. “I want to strip things down to what’s really important,” Mr. Fraser said, “and figure out what’s really essential.”
That’s an impulse that more and more chefs are indulging. Uninterested in the old formalities, impatient with the conventional rigmarole and eager simply to put their food in front of people, they’re asking themselves how much they can toy with the rest of the equation. Which trappings can be jettisoned, which rituals abandoned, and what novel shapes can a restaurant take while still fulfilling its core mission?
Mr. Fraser’s novelty, scheduled to open on Jan. 25 for what he estimates will be a nine-month run, is one answer — an especially striking, even eccentric one. It’s called What Happens When, and if the thought were finished and the predicate filled in, it would mention rules being rewritten and assumptions challenged.
Diners, for example, will be expected to set and reset the cutlery on their tables with utensils from drawers beneath. That way Mr. Fraser won’t need as many servers. It will save him money, he said, and translate into fewer intrusions for diners. “You’re visited only at points of the meal when you really need help,” he said.
Rather than woo bigwig investors who might make big-time demands, Mr. Fraser has decided to solicit hundreds of what are essentially contributions, from $5 to $2,500, through a micro-financing Web site, Kickstarter, which helps raise money for creative projects.
It’s an improvisatory approach for an improvisatory time, when chefs are finding all sorts of ways to eliminate overhead, streamline operations, edit out distractions and focus on the cooking, which is the beginning, end and point of it all.
In Chicago, the chef Grant Achatz is preparing to open Next, where diners will buy tickets in advance for an appointed hour and a predetermined menu. The pinpoint planning that allows him will save money on service staff.
Some chefs are hatching pop-up restaurants, which squat for just days or weeks in locations already furnished and equipped. Some are giving meals on wheels a spin.
Will Goldfarb, a refugee from several flashy, failed Manhattan restaurants, has done both. From 2009 to 2010 he collaborated on a barbecue trailer in the financial district called Picnick Smoked. And in late November he and several assistants made desserts for two days in borrowed bar space in SoHo.
“We just walked in and cooked,” he said. “We didn’t have to do a whole launch.” Word of mouth brought in all the business needed for the pop-up’s fleeting existence.
By serving just one fixed multicourse dinner menu to a small group, the downtown restaurants Momofuku Ko and Torrisi Italian Specialties produce ambitious food from limited kitchens.
And they’re extravagant next to Porchetta, which the chef Sara Jenkins spent $200,000 (not much, in restaurant terms) to open in the East Village in 2008. It occupies just 275 square feet on the street level, seats all of six people and, at the start, served three main items: a porchetta plate, a porchetta sandwich and a mozzarella sandwich. But it reinvigorated her career while satisfying a bedrock desire. “What makes me happy,” she said, “is cooking good food and seeing people eat it.”
All around the city — and, for that matter, the country — restaurants are assuming unfamiliar, impromptu forms. To bide time and drum up revenue between the closing of Cabrito last month and the construction, in the same Village space, of a successor, its owners are playing host to a rotating cast of guest bartenders, whose libations will be accompanied by a succinct menu of ham sandwiches, ham plates, ham-stuffed fried chicken, a burger and peel-and-eat shrimp.
A menu of small plates that the chef Ari Stern serves at the bar Culturefix on the Lower East Side is also succinct, but what’s more noteworthy is the setting. Culturefix is conjoined with an electronics store above it and an art gallery in the back. The painting commissions and lamp and clock sales relieve him of pressure to move a large quantity of food or wring a big profit from it.
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What Happens When; 25 Cleveland Place (Kenmare Street); (212) 925-8310.
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