In-store eateries trendy again

When you eat at a restaurant in a store, there is a very good chance you will eat salad. There is always salad: Chicken Caesar at the Barnes & Noble Kitchen. Gem lettuce with radish and feta at RH, the Restoration Hardware restaurant. Golden beet and tatsoi salad at Terrain, the Anthropologie restaurant. There has always been salad: Sliced pineapple and cheese salad for 55 cents at Marshall Fields, sometime in the early 20th century. Or, in 1980, $8 for a salade de cresson with watercress and smoked turkey — expensive at the time — at SoHo Charcuterie, a restaurant that once existed within a New York location of Ann Taylor, the patron saint of the pencil skirt.

When the first department stores began opening restaurants to serve their shoppers, those shoppers were women, and those women ate salads. Many of those retail restaurants went away, but now they’re back again, and there are still women — and men, this time, too — eating salads. Except they’re also eating roasted bone marrow, or coconut rice cakes, or tofu with cauliflower and harissa, and drinking nitro cold brew and sparkling elderflower-blackberry sodas.

Retail restaurants are just like other restaurants. Except they’re in a store, which makes them nothing like other restaurants, because they don’t carry the same risks. They have a guaranteed space, a steady stream of customers and an ulterior motive: to get you to buy stuff. And not just another salad.

It’s “old retail,” said Barbara Kahn, professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. “The notion of the impulse buy, and the idea that the more time you spend in the space, you’re more likely to buy something.”

Come for the avocado toast. Leave with some jeans.

Department store dining

Department stores in the early 20th century set the precedent, with their glamorous tea rooms offering extensive menus.

“They were not cheap, but they were not luxury places,” said restaurant and retail historian Jan Whitaker, author of “Service and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class.” “The whole idea was to keep your customers in the store as long as possible. And so you’re not going to have some place that nobody can afford.”

They were mostly open for lunch, with elaborate salads — considered very upscale at the time — as well as hot dishes. There would be fashion shows in the restaurant, and extravagant displays of merchandise, especially around the holidays.

But after World War II, department stores began to decline: People moved to the suburbs, and discount stores captured more market share. As companies began to cut back, the restaurants suffered. By the 1970s and ’80s, said Whitaker, they seemed hopelessly outdated.

“They were these sort of formal-looking restaurants … with big columns and chandeliers and all that kind of stuff,” said Whitaker. “People would have said, ‘Oh that’s where old ladies go.’ ” Some survived in New York, but the mall food court ascended elsewhere.

The first American Ikea opened outside Philadelphia in 1985, with a 200-seat restaurant serving its now-iconic Swedish meatballs. Other brands, throughout the years, have similarly experimented, with varying degrees of success. Ralph Lauren’s Chicago restaurant opened in 1999, and is still dishing out burgers and lobster bisque. But nothing remains of Torpedo Joe’s, a short-lived sandwich chain that occupied flagship Old Navy stores in the late ’90s.

Beyond big chains

Retail restaurants come and go. But what’s different about the most recent wave is that it’s not just big chains. Smaller clothing brands, single-location boutiques, banks and cellphone companies are getting into the restaurant business, some in a way that competes with independent restaurants nearby.

There’s a Jimmy’s Coffee inside the Frank & Oak store in Toronto’s cool Queen West neighborhood. You can actually now have breakfast at Tiffany’s, which opened a restaurant in its New York store. An AT&T in Seattle features “the Lounge,” a coffee shop and community gathering space. A Paula Deen restaurant is in a San Antonio Bass Pro Shop. Four European locations of H&M have cafes, called It’s Pleat, that serve sandwiches and cold-pressed green juice. Ralph Lauren, in addition to its successful Polo cafes, has launched Ralph’s, a stylish coffee shop in its Upper East Side store. Capital One now has 36 cafes serving Peet’s coffee in its banking branches in 15 cities.

“We want to be where our customers live, work and play,” said Jennifer Windbeck, managing vice president of Capital One cafes and branches. The cafes offer “the delivery of financial services through new technologies, balanced with the desire for human connection.”

Big-name restaurateurs and chefs aren’t shying away from the retail world, especially in partnerships with smaller, more upscale brands. After the success of his 2010 restaurant ABC Kitchen, in New York’s ABC Carpet & Home, chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten opened ABC Cocina in 2013 and the vegetable-focused ABCV in 2017. Restaurateur Stephen Starr’s La Mercerie serves omelets and oysters in New York’s Roman and Williams Guild, a purveyor of fancy housewares (“Tablewares are available for purchase,” reads a note on the menu). Restaurateur Brendan Sodikoff, of New York’s popular Au Cheval, is behind the Restoration Hardware restaurants. Chicago chef Bill Kim is partnering with Crate and Barrel, which will open the Table at Crate in Oak Brook, Ill., in July.

It’s all part of a strategy to lure online shoppers back into physical stores by offering unique experiences.

“People eat out more often than they shop for, say, a pair of shoes. So if you’re after increased traffic and increased frequency of use of your store, restaurants are the obvious solution,” restaurant consultant Michael Whiteman said in an email. “These new restaurants are no longer mere amenities; they can become destinations.”