Carolyn Fath Ashby
What if your coworking space had a forward-looking, local-sourcing, made-from-scratch restaurant and dynamite coffeehouse on its first floor? Sweet.
That’s the idea behind Everyday Kitchen, located in the new Lodgic Everyday Community, a coworking facility being built at 2801 Marshall Court in the village of Shorewood Hills — near Sa Bai Thong on University Avenue.
Executive chef Eric Kelly planned the original Everyday Kitchen for Lodgic’s first coworking space in Champaign, Illinois, which opened in October 2018. Kelly did the market research and says in-house food and beverage service is novel inside coworking spaces: “Sometimes they’ll have catered breakfasts, but a full restaurant [like ours] is unique. There’s no pulling food out of boxes. Even all of our pastries and cookies are made in-house by our pastry chef.”
Everyday Kitchen is a breakfast, lunch and dinner open-to-the-public restaurant. With a coffee shop. And a bar. The bar will serve cocktails, but also “quick energizer detoxers” made with fresh juices.
The restaurant will seat 100, with a seasonal patio to seat an additional 48. Those working in Lodgic’s coworking space will have easy access to food and drink, but Kelly expects only about 10 percent of business to come from those in the building.
Kelly wants 25 percent of the menu to be signature dishes that will be on all Everyday Kitchen menus — the braised beef short ribs and the ahi tuna pizza, for instance. “But we are chef-driven, so we want to give the chef [in each location] the autonomy to put out an exceptional menu,” says Kelly.
The rest of the menu will be geared to regional cuisine preferences. While Madison and Champaign are not that far apart geographically, they do differ in their food cultures. The kitchen in Champaign focuses on “big plate, comfort food,” says Kelly, whereas Madison is “a very sophisticated food town.”
Creating different menu items for Madison means including some cultural favorites — cheese curds and freshwater walleye, for instance — but it also means more innovative vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free dishes, using hormone-free proteins, line-caught seafood, and other sustainable products. Kelly plans on local sourcing, from the vodka and bourbon in the bar’s cocktails to produce, meats and cheese. The search is on to pick a coffee roaster local to Madison.
Kelly hopes Everyday Kitchen will be open by June 1 or before.
This will be the second Everyday Kitchen; a third is in progress in Louisville, Kentucky. Seven more are in the planning stage.
Lodgic Everyday Community coworking spaces are a project of the Loyal Order of the Moose — yes, the fraternal organization — designed to continue the group’s history of service by establishing “a productivity-boosting workspace, flexible drop-in childcare, and fun, good-for-you dining,” according to the Lodgic website. Lodgic Everyday Community is a nonprofit; profits go to Mooseheart, a children’s charity run by the Moose, Kelly says.
[Editor's note: This article has been corrected to note that the Madison location of Everyday Kitchen is in the Village of Shorewood Hills. Ted Stay is no longer head chef; that information has changed since publication and has been deleted.]
