When Restaurant Kitchens Do Double Duty

When Restaurant Kitchens Do Double Duty

Two Side-by-Side Restaurants, With Two Different Menus But One Kitchen, Attract a Trendy Clientèle

By Alina Dizik in the Wall Street Journal

Bigger isn’t better, according to the latest fine-dining trends. Small plates and small menus are signs of authentic cuisine and personal service.

That is one reason why many restaurateurs are carving two separate restaurants out of one larger space. Each has its own separate entrance, its own menu and its own intimate dining room. The catch is the two restaurants typically share the same kitchen.

Often the two completely separate full-service restaurants will pair cuisines as varied as Japanese and French, or Mexican and American comfort food. Others are a formal restaurant paired with a gastropub.

Consumers may understand that the two share a common owner and a kitchen, or they may have no idea.

In Chicago, a brick wall separates Paris Club Bistro & Bar, a French restaurant, from the upscale noodle restaurant Ramen-san, which the Chicago restaurant group Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises opened in the French restaurant’s former bar area.

An unmarked service corridor connects the shared kitchen to the two dining areas.

Ramen-san and Paris Club share one head chef, and each has its own sous chef. Kitchen stations each serve both restaurants, preparing dishes such as steak frites and bowls of ramen.

“It’s really designed for guests not to know that the restaurants are connected,” says Doug Psaltis, chef-partner at Paris Club and Ramen-san.

The restaurants’ menus are completely separate, and diners don’t request to order from the menu next door, he says.

Two restaurants in the space is a cost saver. With fine-dining traffic still not fully recovered from the steep declines in 2008, restaurateurs continue to be ruthless about cutting spending.

Industry profit margins typically hover around 8%, says Stephani Robson, a senior lecturer at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration in Ithaca, N.Y.

The ability to shift staff between two kitchens and reduce spending on kitchen equipment and prep areas can push margins well into the double digits, she says. “The most expensive real estate is under the ventilation hood.”

A dual-concept restaurant also can boost revenue by drawing more diners. Restaurateurs have struggled to draw diners in their 20s in recent years.

Typically these young diners don’t like returning to the same place twice. They are eager to “take a selfie with the beverage and move on,” Dr. Robson says. But by having two smaller spaces, a restaurant can look busier. “If it’s full, people think it must be good,” she says.

In Boston, the gastropub Deep Ellum shares a space—and a liquor license—with Lone Star Taco Bar. That has helped contain costs in a city where liquor license fees can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, says co-owner Max Toste.

The two restaurants are a weekend destination and have increased foot traffic in the neighborhood, Mr. Toste says.

But on slower days, like Sunday and Monday, when diners walk in “the space still feels cozy and awesome,” he adds.

Craig Justman, a 47-year-old research scientist who lives five minutes from the restaurants, says he and his wife, Amy, enjoy the way they can indulge cravings by dining in two restaurants in one place.

Often on what the couple calls their “Taco Tuesday” at Lone Star, the two sit together at the bar. Ms. Justman orders tacos while Mr. Justman has an appetizer of tortilla chips and salsa. Then they relocate to Deep Ellum for Mr. Justman’s main course, the “Best Wurst,” a plate of house-made charcuterie.

“It creates a nice easy kind of dinner,” Mr. Justman says.

Despite the single kitchen space at Deep Ellum and Lone Star Taco, Mr. Toste keeps kitchen duties separate and uses separate equipment and prep areas. Wait staff work at both restaurants over the course of the week. But the restaurant doesn’t accommodate requests to order food from next door.

Upscale Washington, D.C., restaurant Birch & Barley is well known for its extensive draft and bottled beer offerings, and it is also somewhat formal.

Its daily prix fixe tasting menu with beer pairings features dishes such as pan-seared monk fish with grits.

Executive chef Kyle Bailey wanted to offer more casual bar fare and family-friendly dishes, but not in the same dining room. “If there’s a table having an expensive tasting menu, I don’t want the guy next to him snacking on onion rings,” Mr. Bailey said.

So in addition to Birch & Barley, in 2009 he helped open a second bar and restaurant upstairs, ChurchKey, at the same time.

Upstairs, there’s an adventurous bar menu of dishes such as cauliflower salad, grilled cheese and fettuccine with roasted meatballs, broccoli rabe and rutabaga.

Guests can only order off one menu, but Birch & Barley accommodates requests from families with children who want to order off the ChurchKey menu, he says.

When one kitchen prepares two menus, it can be a struggle to prepare dishes from ChurchKey’s casual menu quickly while also working more slowly to create intricate dishes from the Birch & Barley menu. Maintaining food quality and flow requires armylike precision.

A few restaurateurs have experimented with letting customers order across menus. Recently, Mr. Bailey says, he offered ChurchKey diners “tater tots” stuffed with foie gras, an ingredient that features prominently downstairs.

“That didn’t go over as well as we’d thought,” Mr. Bailey said.

Chef owner Jose Garces wasn’t eager to expand a second time when space next door to his Philadelphia tapas restaurant, Tinto, became available.

He had already done so once, adding wine-inspired warm wood décor. This time he wanted to create something new.

He opened Village Whiskey a “bourbon and burger bar,” in 2009 in a casual, tile-and-wood space.

Tinto had two kitchens, and so he split one of them to do double duty for Village Whiskey. Both restaurants occupy what had been three townhomes connected via a basement passageway.

Creating two separate menus from one kitchen meant more constraints. Mr. Garces scrapped a fresh lobster dish from the Village Whiskey menu because there wasn’t enough room to boil the lobster in the cramped basement kitchen.

Village Whiskey prepares pickles alongside the place where Tinto’s charcuterie and cheese dishes are plated. Tinto prepares its crab croquettes next to Village Whiskey’s barbecue pork sandwich. “We built our menu around the kitchen infrastructure,” Mr. Garces said.