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One Off Hospitality Commissary Caters to an Expanding Clientele
- Bob Benenson
- 14 hours ago
- 4 min read
Stand-Alone Food Prep Facility Plays to Restaurant Group's Strengths
Chicago’s much-awarded One Off Hospitality restaurant group made news last October with the opening of its stand-alone catering commissary. It is a facility that would have been unimaginable just a few years before.
Restaurants and caterers were distinctly different things through most of the nation’s culinary history. Restaurants provided dining experiences for individuals and small groups; catering provided food for bigger, off-site parties and events that required more kitchen space than most restaurants could spare.
Over the past couple of decades, restaurant industry analysts discerned that a growing number of people had an increasing interest in restaurant-quality food in non-restaurant settings. One Off Hospitality Group — known for restaurants such as The Publican, Avec, Big Star and Dove’s Luncheonette, and for renowned Executive Chef Paul Kahan — edged toward accommodating that demand, particularly through Big Star, its highly popular Mexican-themed franchise.
“Big Star in 2019 would probably do somewhere around 150 Big Star weddings. It was an affordable product. It was lots of fun. Young people really were attracted to it, versus these more formal things,” said One Off Hospitality CEO Karen Browne, with whom I visited recently at the commissary.
But, she added, “All of this was really being pushed out of the back door of a restaurant.”
Then came the raging COVID pandemic. With restaurant dining rooms shuttered from March 2020 through a year or more, takeout and delivery options became more than a side hustle: Many restaurant owners recognized that additional revenue streams were a matter of survival.
One Off Hospitality responded to this clarifying moment with its Suburban Supper Series, which provided prepared meals for pickups in 12 Chicago-area communities. “We knew that people still wanted access to great food,” Karen said. “They were struggling with lots of challenges of isolation, so that program grew very quickly, and the run rate on that program’s top line revenue was almost $3 million.”
The crisis abated, the restaurants reopened, but the consumer demand prompted the One Off Hospitality team to contemplate a deeper dive into catering. Karen said, “Our thinking was, we create these great moments in restaurants, and these moments not only contain beautiful food, but a level of hospitality that really complements the entire moment. So how do we do that in a larger way for people's special moments?”
There was also a mutual understanding that if they were to move forward, they would need a separate food prep kitchen for catering orders. “The group doesn't do anything 50 percent,” Karen said, “If we're going to do this, let's build a state-of-the-art commissary” and hire industry professionals to run it."
The commissary was built out in a one-story building in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood that already housed the first brick-and-mortar outlet for the group’s Publican Quality Bread. Michelle Krage, with 20 years of experience in event planning and management, was hired as vice president of catering and events; Gabriele Austraite, who has worked in top Chicago restaurant kitchens, became executive chef.
And the commissary opened with a spectacular party on October 24.
The group’s high profile enables the catering unit to play to One Off Hospitality’s strengths — while giving the team plenty of room for outside-the-box creativity. “A lot of times people will call and say, “I want to do the Publican wedding,” but they also want Avec’s famous bacon-wrapped dates, Karen said. She added, “We also have some fun and give our chefs some latitude in terms of bringing out a suckling pig in someone's backyard or bringing pizza ovens and doing the event focaccia onsite, things that I think really are not pedestrian.”
Karen also proudly noted that One Off events are staffed only by employees, never temps, even for the mega-concert event Lollapalooza, where the group provides food for VIP and premium ticket holders.
And the catering unit continues to expand in new directions, including a partnership in which One Off Hospitality feeds the players and employees of the Chicago Fire men’s professional soccer team.
“We're cooking for 150 people a day,” Karen explained. “We put an entire team on site. They built a $100 million facility over there, and we have a team there that's working with the nutritionist, working on high-performance diets with these elite athletes. That's again where we would be selected over a catering company, because we have that ability, we have that skill set, to absolutely align to very high-performance diets.”
In fact, the catering unit has been such an immediate success that Karen said there is a concern about “how fast we’re going to grow out of this facility.”
Which sounds like a good problem to have.
