by Kristen Wile

When Kindred Restaurant had to close its doors for repairs, co-owner and designer Katy Kindred didn’t want to reopen with many aesthetic changes to the restaurant. Instead, the team took the opportunity to improve the restaurant’s service areas and smooth out back-of-house flow. The restaurant reopens to diners on Tuesday, Oct. 20.

“Most of the changes, unless you’re a Kindred diehard, probably won’t be felt so much by the guests,” Kindred says. “That was intentional just because I really wanted it to be familiar when you walked in and not be like ‘Oh my gosh, it’s just a totally different place, it lost the same feel it had before.'”

A fire in the upstairs bathroom wastebasket triggered the nearby emergency sprinklers, sending water through the floors to the basement level, which houses the kitchen. Though no equipment needed to be replaced, the tile was relaid in the chef’s table area near the kitchen. The most noticeable changes are in the bar area, which now has a new marble top and darker gray-blue base along with a brass drink rail and more storage in the back bar. Kindred says before the old bar was taken out, she had the carpenters map out the countertop to ensure the footprint remained the same. 

“A lot of the changes that we made were really more to benefit the staff than anything else,” she says. “There’s a lot that we’ve learned in 12 years about how to lay out a bar, how to most efficiently have our service station set up, so it was sort of an opportunity to rethink some of those kind of items.”

That rethinking will allow for changes in the cocktail menu, as the bartenders now have more room to store tinctures and other ingredients that may not have had shelf space before, Kindred says. 

Following the fire, the restaurant has also switched to battery-powered candles.

As renovations at Kindred were underway, much of the staff moved temporarily to other concepts, including recently opened steakhouse Deepwell. The Kindred team also spent time volunteering in Davidson, including working in the town’s community garden and picking up trash around the lake.

To celebrate the restaurant’s reopening, the kitchen staff has been looking through more than a decade’s worth of Kindred menus and will bring back some dishes from the restaurant’s initial opening menu as they welcome guests back.

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