Houndstooth restaurant in Benton Harbor is hosting Chicago-based popup restaurant Birria Ta-Ta-Tacos to take over its kitchen and celebrate its second-birthday at 5 p.m on Thursday.
In reality, the restaurant is celebrating the greater accomplishment of surviving the COVID-19 pandemic amidst a year-long construction project that closed the road in front of its business.
Houndstooth, 132 Pipestone St., Benton Harbor, serves highly-detailed New American fine dining. Its second birthday celebration will be a more casual, street-food, atmosphere where guests will order counter-service style and seat themselves. Reservations are not required. Guests will be served on a first-come basis beginning at 5 p.m. and ending when the dishes sell out.
Menu items will include Mexican-style beef birria, veggie and cheese tacos, ramen, as well as boozy slushies, Jello shots, beer and wine.
When asked why brother-and-sister co-owner chefs Cheyenne and James Galbraith are giving up control of the kitchen on their restaurant’s birthday, Cheyenne’s answer was simple:
“We wanna eat tacos. We don’t want to work — we want to socialize with all the people that come. And we want to give [Birria Ta-Ta-Tacos owner] Oscar space to make some money and give him some business.”
James Galbraith first connected with Birria Ta-Ta-Tacos while working at Big Kids gourmet sandwich restaurant, in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago, when the two restaurants collaborated for a similar pop-up event.
Houndstooth has a reputation for being a bridge between southwest Michigan and Chicago in progressive dining culture, making it a natural choice to host a Chicago-based restaurant for the day.
How to build a Houndstooth dish
Learning to play that intermediary bridge role was a hard-won skill for the chef team, who said some of their creations at the Bistro on the Boulevard in St. Joseph, where they worked prior to opening Houndstooth, were received with skepticism by locals.
“We’re transplants, and without sounding bougie, we had to sort of learn to teach a small town how to eat,” Cheyenne Galbraith said.
James Galbraith explained that the co-owner chefs now use a kind of formula for building a dish:
“We start by putting something on the plate that’s comforting and familiar — like bacon, everybody loves bacon — that people already know they like. Then we add something fun to draw people in. Then we add something new, to get people outside their comfort zone, but not so far out that they’re afraid to try.”
Houndstooth has a cult-following of clients who often bring their friends to show them, “how to Houndstooth.”
It’s a unique dining experience where small plates are shared in an intimate dining room atmosphere, which is intentionally curated to the smallest detail. The chef presents each course at the table with a brief explanation of the ingredients, how they compliment each other, and the dish’s history.
Surviving COVID-19 and construction zones
As a restaurant where the dining experience is a huge part of the business model, Houndstooth faced greater challenges than most when forced to adapt to COVID-19 restrictions and providing takeout service.
The restaurant first created some innovative solutions for bringing the Houndstooth experience into people’s homes, and to continue bringing money into the business.
“We knew that to-go food doesn’t travel all that well,” James Galbraith said.
They converted part of the restaurant into an upscale bodega to sell gourmet packaged food, crackers, sauces, and seafood. They prepared Hello Fresh-style five-step meals for people to buy and cook at home. They also considered producing home-cooking videos in lieu of the private cooking classes the chefs formerly provided onsite.
“After all that effort, it turned out that people really just wanted us to cook their food for them, and put it in a box, and give it to them in a parking lot,” James Galbraith said.
When Houndstooth was shut down by two different state mandates due to COVID-19, building owner Ken Ankli took the initiative to delay the restaurant’s rent payments each time.
“Sometimes we felt like a charity case,” Cheyenne Galbraith said. “People sometimes came into the restaurant and left five-hundred-dollar tips for the staff just to help us keep going. The community is the reason we survived, and that’s how we’ll continue to survive.”
Houndstooth also received government assistance in the form of loans and grants, which both co-owners cited as critical to the business’s survival.
The business made $500,000 in revenue during the year that it was closed or partially closed, which was about half of its original revenue goal for business year-two.
When restaurants were permitted to re-open for outdoor dining and indoor dining at 50% capacity, the co-owners scrambled to build an outdoor patio. They originally planned to build a patio within five years, but hadn’t figured out where to put it.
Cornerstone Alliance, Houndstooth’s neighbor and owner of the parking lot behind its building, offered to rent the restaurant five of its parking spaces for $1 in order to build a temporary removable patio to use during the outdoor dining season.
Then, two major construction projects closed Pipestone Road in front of the restaurant, and encroached its back parking lot, for one year.
“In some ways, the construction was harder than COVID for us to be profitable and successful,” Cheyenne Galbraith said.
“We had bulldozers in front of our windows ripping up the sidewalk to our building. It was like watching your whole life being dug up in front of your face.”
Pipestone Road is expected to re-open on Tuesday.
Houndstooth is now operating at full capacity. Reservations are required (not including the birthday celebration) and booked one to two weeks in advance. Visit eathoundstooth.com for reservations and more information.
