Why Crate And Barrel Is Opening Its First Full-Service Restaurant
Source: ADPRO, Stephanie Sporn
Photo: The pastry-filled bar at the restaurant. As a purveyor of both furniture and kitchenware, Crate and Barrel is uniquely positioned to create an immersive dining experience. (Courtesy of Crate and Barrel)
The restaurant, dubbed The Table at Crate, will be located in the retailer’s Oak Brook, Illinois, store and will make good use of the company’s products
For more than half a century, Crate and Barrel has made playing host a relatively achievable feat. Long known for its accessible and seemingly endless assortment of home goods, the brand is now introducing its latest offering, which is up a different alley (or aisle): a full-service restaurant where customers can see its products in action. Occupying two indoor and outdoor levels of the Chicago retailer’s Oak Brook, Illinois, store, The Table at Crate fully realizes the brand’s modern casual dining ethos in both menu and ambience. The restaurant, which opens this month, also marks the first retail venture for Cornerstone Restaurant Group, with whom Crate and Barrel has collaborated.
“Entertaining has always been extremely important to Crate and Barrel, as evidenced in our product assortment throughout history,” Sebastian Brauer, Crate and Barrel’s new VP of product design and development, tells AD PRO. “We are a company that began by helping customers set their tables.” Since joining Crate and Barrel in December 2018, Brauer has drawn upon his background in home, fashion, and global artisan design development to diversify the brand’s merchandise and deepen the stories it tells. For The Table at Crate, this meant furnishing the retailer’s signature white shell space with some of its iconic pieces in bolder colors, patterns, and materials. Marble textures, light wood, vegetable-tanned leather, and velvet mohair are among the fresh finishes, and almost all of the items used in the restaurant are available for purchase—or will be in the near future.
Selected to evoke wellness, the restaurant’s color palette features a range of greens with touches of blush tones. At the center of the space is a communal table anchored by hand-blown glass pendant lights. Crate and Barrel’s team of visual artists also created a wall installation with a selection of the company’s white and gray plates as both a backdrop and a showcase of the store’s history.
Each dish on The Table at Crate’s lunch, dinner, and tableside tea service menus has been meticulously crafted by Bill Kim, chef and Cornerstone Restaurant Group partner, to complement the restaurant’s atmosphere. “The dishes are truly representative of the whole menu and the Crate and Barrel brand: clean, modern, [and] approachable, while demonstrating playful accents of the classics,” Kim tells AD PRO. His favorite menu items at The Table at Crate include deep-dish cauliflower lasagna and watermelon salad with poached shrimp and forbidden black rice. “It’s all about familiar but exciting!” he says.
Indeed. But news of The Table at Crate feels in line with recent experiential and brand-focused expansions as well—most notably that of RH, formerly known as Restoration Hardware. (The furniture retailer has opened restaurants in many of its locations, and a stand-alone restaurant in Yountville, California.) However, Brauer asserts that the decision to open up this first dining option was based on much more than apparent trends. “Our major philosophy has been about activating our product in ways that feel real and personal,” he stresses. “That’s why we wanted to go into the restaurant space. It wasn’t necessarily to drive traffic, or to be in this trend of integrating food and beverage with retail. We wanted to deliver something special to our customers that was very closely connected to our heritage of entertaining and being gracious hosts,” explains Brauer. “It’s not about building a lifestyle. It’s about creating life.”