The restaurant has converted into a corner store.
Award-winning restaurant, Fat Rice, has closed for good. Rather than wait for and ultimately navigate the conditions of the new normal, the business has made the decision to kill the restaurant, and open Super Fat Rice Mart in its place.
“The restaurant for the forseeable future is dead,” Fat Rice’s chef and co-owner, Abe Conlon, told the New York Times. “We need to face the reality that we can’t exist in the future as it looks now. People are not going to feel comfortable being in close quarters or being in a cramped dining room.”
While many restaurants wait on pins and needles to re-open once the stay-at-home order is lifted, Fat Rice has no such plans.
“We feel like we need to adapt to what’s happening,” said co-owner, Adrienne Lo. “That doesn’t mean we’re never going to have regular dine-in customers again. But we feel like that’s not going to be for at least a year, and probably longer.”
Conlon and Lo have decided to pivot their business, opening Super Fat Rice Mart.
“Super Fat Rice Mart is a specialty cooking store offering Fat Rice at-home cook kits along with organic and local produce, Portuguese imports, beer and wine offerings, a wide array of fun Asian pantry items, and take-away favorites all with that fun Fat Rice flare,” the company wrote on its website.
The meal kits from Super Fat Rice Mart contain spices, grains, prepared items, and other seasonal ingredients with Fat Rice recipes to make at home.
“It’s basically two days of food for two people with leftovers and snacks,” Conlon said of the meal kits. “At Fat Rice, we brought home-cooked food into a restaurant. It feels natural to just bring it back.”
Super Fat Rice Mart also plans to offer Shake N’ Stir cocktail kits soon.
Fat Rice opened in Chicago back in 2012, and in 2018, received a James Beard Award for the Best Chef in the Great Lakes region.
[Featured image: @eatfatrice]