by Kristen Wile

Milkbread, with locations in the former Dairy Queen on Central Avenue and Davidson, is expanding to Uptown. Kristen Wile/UP

While restaurant closures still aren’t out of the question — many owners find themselves facing a backlog of deferred rent — Charlotte’s restaurant scene is growing rapidly once again, with a slew of new concepts announcing they’ll open this year, among them Chapter 6 from Dressler’s Restaurant Group and Albertine, an upscale restaurant coming to Uptown by Joe and Katy Kindred.

For the Kindreds, the pandemic didn’t slow growth — instead, it inspired a new concept unlike anything they’d done before. The popularity of their Milkbread doughnut popups, combined with the way the shift to cooking food that traveled well inspired their kitchen staff, led the restaurateurs to open the first location of Milkbread in Davidson when a fitting space became available.

“It was more of an organic thing that kind of grew out of the pandemic,” Katy Kindred says. “And then like every other deal, it’s economics, and there were quite a few people who were kind of desperate to fill some spaces, so we got a good deal and the rest was history. And that one worked out almost at the exact same time as the deal falling through for the Dairy Queen building, which we had been talking to them about well before that.”

The new location of Milkbread in the upcoming Duke Energy uptown headquarters will make for the couple’s third restaurant opening since the pandemic, with upscale restaurant Albertine, in the same building, the fourth. The restaurant marks their first new full-service concept since the opening of Hello, Sailor in late 2017.

“We felt like it’s time to move on and just keep doing what we do,” Kindred says. “I think that’s just what most entrepreneurs do. I mean, this was a really bad setback and of epic proportions. But that’s just kind of how we’re wired as entrepreneurs. We get setbacks all the time. And so it’s like, ‘Okay, how do we get around it?'”

The setbacks that still linger following the pandemic haven’t stopped restaurants from opening, but they have significantly slowed the process. From equipment delays to slow permitting processes, restaurateurs are being forced to either delay opening repeatedly or leave a generous amount of time for construction.

“It takes considerably longer to order chairs or anything made out of metal or get in the queue for permitting,” Rare Roots Hospitality’s Tim Buchanan says. Chapter 6 will be the sixth restaurant for the group. “The pace of growth, the number of people looking to fill spaces or construction hasn’t really slowed down, but getting everything in line has been a little bit of a challenge, just making sure air conditioning units and hoods are ordered well in advance so as not to fall behind schedule.”

Another local restaurant group expanding this year is High Tide Hospitality; The Waterman will open a new location at Charlotte Douglas Airport. While the group is growing, according to co-owner Paul Manley, they waited to do so until they were certain they had the staff and structure to grow smoothly. The restaurant group learned an important lesson while trying to open two new locations of Ace No. 3 at the same time, and amid labor struggles.

“That was a learning moment for us as a company: don’t get ahead of yourself too much, because it took us a while to really get our feet under us,” Manley says. “We had this one little burger joint, and were like, ‘How hard can it be? Let’s do a couple more.’ It turns out it’s just as much work to run an 1,800-square-foot burger place as it is to run a 4,000-square-foot, full-service restaurant. We had to adjust our game and our mindset a little bit because we did grow too fast. And hopefully we learned from that mistake to be responsible with the opportunities that come in front of us.”

That thoughtfulness is one thing all three owners agreed is necessary to successfully grow — pandemic or not.