Last updated: April 15, 2025

In the Weeds

There are places where you get the feeling they’re opening only to take advantage of the city’s booming restaurant scene. They likely have faux exposed brick, industrial touches, food and beverage programs more ambitious than they can maintain, and don’t realize the difficulty of launching a successful restaurant. The places we find ourselves drawn back to, on the other hand, give you the feeling that this place and the people behind it would never want to be doing anything else. That’s the vibe Kindred has had since opening in early 2015.

At the core of Joe and Katy Kindred’s first restaurant is a love of hospitality, and that strong foundation helps elevate Kindred above what most other restaurants can offer.

Katy Kindred’s design of the Davidson Main Street restaurant takes inspiration from the space’s history. She found the stunning carpentry that frames out the back bar leaning up against a staircase during construction, and the bar — with its crisp whites and patinaed mirror behind it — nods subtly back to the days when a pharmacy occupied the space.

Both Kindreds share laid-back, easy-to-admire personalities, and those traits are seemingly contagious. Servers explain the menu without any pompousness, even though much of what comes out of the kitchen needs explaining. Their guidance is one of the most important pieces to enjoying an experience here; if you stay away from the unfamiliar, you’ll miss out on some serious deliciousness. Ingredients such as peperonata, katsuobushi, or ‘nduja look intimidating. They’re not; peperonata is a bell pepper dish, katsuobushi is a dried, smoked fish, and nduja is an Italian spreadable salami (read more about that here). You can expect most dishes to have Joe’s signature brightness from citrus and tangy olive oil and use local ingredients, and you can also expect to fall in love with the milkbread, a light but moist bread sprinkled with salt.

Thanks to Katy’s training as a sommelier and the house’s creative cocktails, the beverage program is just as impressive. The wine list has both the necessary and untraditional, and ordering a bartender’s choice cocktail is a fun way to start a meal as you snack on milkbread and a cheese plate and ponder the menu.

The menu at Kindred today is much more complex than what the restaurant opened with, a sign that the kitchen continues to challenge itself instead of sticking with what earned the restaurant a ranking on Bon Appetit’s best new restaurants list and Joe Kindred a James Beard Award semi-finalist nomination. The fact that it continues to thrive serving today’s evolution of the menu, with dishes many diners have never heard of, is a testament to the trust diners have in this place. Even if regulars don’t know what something is, they are certain it’s going to be good. And with that trust, Kindred is pushing our area’s culinary stereotypes, helping us earn a reputation as a city of talented, passionate chefs and adventurous eaters.