Redstart is expanding beyond meal delivery with its first Durham restaurant & bar
The weekly menu for Redstart Foods drops on Thursday afternoons, beamed into inboxes like the pieces of an eclectic restaurant or an invitation to a dream dinner party — or something in between.
Redstart Foods is a Durham-based meal delivery company, and if owner Matt Northrop could describe it differently he probably would. This genre of eating, popularized by national brands like Blue Apron, offers dinner with doorstep convenience and in some cases a sort of paint-by-numbers kind of cooking. Meal delivery meals sometimes seem to satisfy the necessity of eating food, but maybe not the enjoyment of it.
It’s true, Redstart offers meals for sale on its website and delivers them on Tuesdays, but that’s mostly where the comparisons end. You might see Northrup on Saturdays at the Durham Farmer’s Market, filling a wagon with produce from most of the vendors, which will end up as part of one of a couple dozen dishes offered from a new weekly menu written Thursday morning.
“One thing that’s pretty important about our company, one thing that the national companies really miss, is their food doesn’t seem to have any perspective behind it,” Northrup said. “There’s clearly a chef perspective (at Redstart). We’ve had people approach us and say, ‘We can probably optimize your menu with an algorithm.’ But what makes it special, we are technically an ecommerce company, but it still feels like a really human thing ordering from us.”
Redstart is about to make its most human step yet. The brand will expand with its first restaurant, Takeaway, located next door to Redstart’s kitchen and headquarters at 2827 N. Roxboro St. in Durham.
Takeaway will be many things at once — a retail counter and fridge where diners can pick up packaged salads and bowls or dinners to reheat, a morning coffee bar with pastries, a pantry stocked with kitchen staples like fermented hot sauces and gifts, and its heart and soul, a neighborhood restaurant and bar.
Takeaway’s opening date and menu
Owned by husband and wife Northrup and Jordan Grace Owens, Takeaway looks to open this summer, possibly by June, operating seven days a week, with at least five days as a restaurant, two nights of weekend dinner service, and a backyard patio every day it’s sunny. Mornings will mean breakfast sandwiches and coffee, lunches on the run or in the dining room and weekend specials and nightcaps.
“We feel like it’s something the neighborhood needed, we feel close to the neighborhood, we used to live nearby, we see hanging out here with our kids,” Owens said. “We got into it that way and then we started to see how beneficial it would be for Redstart to be able to get people in the door.”
Redstart’s start
Northrup’s cooking career began in restaurants, including beloved Durham spots like Pizzeria Toro and Rose’s Noodles & Sweets when it was still mostly a whole animal butcher shop. Somewhat burned out with restaurants, he moved into the private chef world in 2015, then expanded into catering.
By early 2020, with months of catering gigs booked and major regular clients like the Durham Bulls, the COVID pandemic forced the ultimate pivot.
“Basically all of our catering business, a fully booked summer of catering gigs, it just all went away,” Northrup said. “The Durham Bulls, they canceled the season that year. It was a pretty huge blow for us. It was a full catering schedule just wiped out.”
Redstart had been doing meal delivery since summer 2019, but suddenly the weekly porch drops of spice-rubbed half chickens, stewed butter beans and falafel kits became the sole business. Northrup said he believed in the food and hoped everything else would work itself out.
“My idea was the food has to be really good and I know how to do that--we’ll figure out the logistical stuff later, you know, like how to actually run a meal delivery company,” Northrup said. “The first time I got in my car, I had all the orders packed up and realized I didn’t even have a route. Like, oh, where do I go first?”
But Redstart’s meal delivery service caught on fairly quickly after enduring 2020. The brand moved into its giant space on Roxboro Street, the former commissary kitchen for longtime caterer Thrills from the Grill.
Takeaway will offer Redstart meals for pickup
In 2022, Redstart was delivering around 100 orders per week and is now doing triple that, built on word of mouth and snappy, delectable Instagram posts.
The menu posts at 2 p.m. on Thursdays, punctuated with well-lit photos taken near the kitchen’s one window, showing sunny salads with herby dressings or skewers of charred pork al pastor destined for tacos. Orders must be in by midnight on Saturday. A team of drivers then drop them off throughout a delivery zone that covers all of Durham, Chapel Hill, Hillsborough and most Raleigh zip codes.
Takeaway aims to ease some of the pressure of weekly ordering. The fridges will be stocked most days with meals from the weekly menu, packaged in cardboard boxes sealed with QR codes leading to reheating instructions.
Perhaps that’s the line where Redstart ends and Takeaway begins. For the last four years Northrup has been writing menus and cooking meals that could then be reheated or reassembled hours later without losing their luster. Northrup only sees opportunity.
“We used to do these brioche doughnuts that were really good, but were really good only when they first come out,” Northrup said. “It will be nice to be able to get fresh produce in and run dinner specials that night.”
Finally, a neighborhood bar for Northgate
The restaurant will be book-ended on one wall by a long banquette that runs the length of the dining room and a bar, which will share a wall with the Redstart kitchen and plans to serve wine and beer.
Takeaway opens in Durham’s best corridor of taquerias, but the stretch of Roxboro doesn’t have a neighborhood bar.
“The one thing that Northgate Park doesn’t have is a bar,” Northrup said. “There should be a place to go and get a drink. The only place you can get a beer around is here is the Super Taqueria, which I definitely do, a lot.”
With Takeaway, Northrup and Owens hope to mirror Redstart’s success in building something better than its model, using the inspiration of a gourmet market.
“In the idea that Redstart is supposed to be the best possible version of a meal delivery company, I think of Takeaway as the best possible version of a roadside market,” Northrup said.
This story was originally published March 28, 2024 at 9:12 AM.
