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This spring, Brooklyn Dumpling Shop, restaurateur Stratis Morfogen’s 24-hour grab-and-go concept with an automat-style ordering system, will open its first location at St. Mark’s Place in the East Village of Manhattan.
In the works well before the crisis kicked-off, the Shop’s menu was built around signature items from Brooklyn Chop House, Morfogen’s full-service restaurant known for dry-aged steaks and inventive dumplings.
“Brooklyn Chop House had a thriving business before the pandemic, then it didn’t,” said Morfogen. “We’re very positive about the future, but the last year was tough.”
In contrast to Chop House, Brooklyn Dumpling Shop, is a seemingly-made-for-a-pandemic concept. With a Zero Human Interaction model, customers will be able to contactlessly choose from 32 unique dumpling varieties, including Philly cheesesteak, French onion soup, lamb gyro, and Impossible; as well as traditional soup dumplings; lobster spring rolls; fried apple and frozen hot chocolate ice cream sundae dumplings, and more.
Going forward, Morfogen plans to open another 15 locations in the tristate area, and, heading into 2022, plans to have another 100 under construction that will be franchises. Over the next four years, with the help of Fransmart, Morfogen is shooting to open a total of 500 franchised stores globally.
While many of Momofuku's full-service restaurants are located in centers or malls that are largely still under lockdown, its fast-casual fried chicken spinoff Fuku is aggressively growing with a delivery-only model.
“Rockefeller Center is closed, a ghost town,” said Alex Munoz-Suarez, CEO of Fuku. “You’re doing 20% of what you used to do, just trying to generate rent.”
The crisis has pushed the group, which had 26 Fuku locations up and running pre-pandemic and was already exploring virtual kitchens, away from brick-and-mortar growth. Instead, Fuku is growing with REEF ghost kitchens, which use shipping containers to house delivery-only kitchens in parking facilities.
Currently, Fuku has one open brick-and-mortar location in New York’s Hudson Yards mall and 12 REEF neighborhood kitchens in six cities. Over the course of 2021, the group plans to go from 12 to 60, delivery-only REEF locations.
Only a regular at Tubby Hook Tavern in the Inwood section of Manhattan would know that the neighborhood beer-and-burger restaurant is also home to Good Cluckin’ Chicken, a fast casual, delivery-only concept.
“Since our to-go and pickup [at Tubby Hook Tavern] was so miniscule, we weren’t fully equipped to go into full-service to-go,” said co-owner Niall Henry. “We had to adjust.”
That adjustment translated into the December 2020 launch of Good Cluckin’ Chicken, which features a menu of Nashville Hot Chicken sandwiches and tenders, mac and cheese and more, made with ingredients already on the Tubby Hook menu and prepared out of the same kitchen.
Henry also has two other virtual concepts secretly running out of the kitchens of his other full-service concepts. His Tryon Public House is also home to the virtual brand Rollatinis Italian NYC; and his Fort Washington Public House serves as the ghost kitchen for the delivery-only Juanitos Taqueria.
“The whole reason for this virtual [spinoff] was to keep us going,” said Henry. “At the end of this [pandemic] it will make us a better company overall.”
Thanks to the pandemic, Avec Rotisserie, which started off as a virtual restaurant run out of Avec, a tiny fine-dining restaurant in Chicago, is now poised to be a complete stand-alone, spin-off brand.
“The original intention was that Avec would operate on the first floor, just as it had been running. And then the second floor we could still execute Avec Rotisserie,” Chef Perry Hendrix, told Nation’s Restaurant News in December.
Avec Rotisserie’s fast-casual menu includes fresh, hearth-baked pitas with hummus and toppings, mezze and whole rotisserie chickens. Half roasted chickens were on the menu at Avec pre-pandemic, but the restaurant only sold between 12 and 20 per day; with the introduction of Avec Rotisserie and delivery, there are upwards of 40 whole rotisserie chickens being delivered on a daily basis, Hendrix estimated.
While the two currently share the same virtual space, as of December, Hendrix said the brands had begun to separate. Hendrix believes the success of Avec Rotisserie so far indicates it will be able to live in its own brick-and-mortar space soon rather than remain a virtual brand.
