Grub Street was given a preliminary peek at Vedge, the forthcoming vegetable restaurant from former Horizons owners Rich Landau and Kate Jacoby that’s taking shape inside the former home of Deux Cheminees at 12th and Locust. Though there’s still another three or four weeks worth of work to go before its ready to begin seating guests, tremendous progress has been made. The sprawling space, which has four functional fireplaces and an elevator for wheelchair access, will feature a bar, cocktail lounge, and two 20-plus seat dining rooms. A vegetable bar — sort of like a chef’s counter or sushi bar — will serve various raw items, pickles, olives, and yes, vegetable charcuterie, which Landau said should be considered more of a technique or process of preserving rather than being exclusively cured meats. It will be festooned with jars of housemade pickles, preserves and potted herb plants. “It’s going to look like Martha Stewart on crack in here,” Landau joked.
Landau and contractors are putting the final touches on a bar in the restaurant’s frontmost area, where the plan is to cultivate a bar scene with happy hours and light bites. He floated a vegetable Korean taco as an example of the types snacks that will be served. Adjacent to the bar will be a cozy cocktail lounge with comfy couches, chairs and a working fireplace. Just past the cocktail lounge will be one of Vedge’s two 20-plus seat dining rooms that opens up to the vegetable bar area. Across from that will be another dining room with another fireplace.
Though he was mostly tight-lipped about Vedge’s menu, Landau told Grub Street that instead of conforming to the standard appetizer-entree-dessert formula that served him well at Horizons, Vedge’s offerings will mostly be small plates that let diners enjoy their meals in a looser, more freeform fashion.
Earlier: Vedge Wants to Be the Veggie Yin to Animal’s Meaty Yang
