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Soho in Ohio City to reopen for dine-in service for the first time in 16 months.
It has been 16 months since the last customer dined inside
SoHo Chicken + Whiskey (1899 W. 25th St., 216-298-9090) in Ohio City. The restaurant, opened by Nolan Konkoski and Molly Smith in 2011, was closed entirely between March and November of 2020, when the space reopened as a pick-up-only concept dubbed Chicken Run. Now, the owners will be retiring Chicken Run after eight months in order to resume – at long last – full-service dining.
“It seems like it’s time – or maybe even past time,” Konkoski says. “Things started moving really, really quick a few months ago – faster than we thought – and we were like, we better get our act together. Everybody else is open and busy and we’re feeling like we’re missing the party.”
Had it not been for the success of Chicken Run, which featured Soho's signature "fried chicken and fixins" combined with salads and sandwiches, Soho might not have returned at all, adds Konkoski.
“Chicken run was a great temporary solution for what we were going through and it definitely helped us keep our employees employed and make some revenue,” he explains. “It wasn’t the best case scenario by any stretch of the imagination, but it worked for us and allowed us to survive 16 months. But we pride ourselves on hospitality and customer experience and passing food through a window is hard to recreate that if you can at all.”
When Soho opens for full-service dining this Thursday, it will look, feel and taste as close to the good-old days as possible. The menu will be the same, save for some seasonal tweaks, and the whiskey selection will be as superb as always.
“Over the last year we’ve kicked around a million ideas of what our restaurant would look like after this and we feel like we don’t really have to change much,” Konkoski says. “I think that people will come in here and want to basically see what we did before.”
To start, the days of operation will be Wednesday through Saturday. The popular Sunday brunch service will resume on August 1. Diners can begin making reservations on Tuesday, July 20.
