Define Your Neighborhood

I am often asked what kind of restaurant the Red Door is. For the longest time, pretty much our first ten years we said Gastropub! It took us pretty much ten years to figure out no one really new what the heck we meant. So now, to sort through it all we’ve gone to simply saying we are neighborhood restaurant that makes everything from scratch and prefers craft products and eschews national brands.

Of course, our definition of neighborhood isn’t necessarily just those whom happen to live in our block. We have a wider approach to how we feel about our neighbors. We are looking at people, families, businesses that empathize with our causes; people that benefit when we are doing well and also feel the crimp when we are doing poorly.

At the Red Door, we talk to other “independent from scratch restaurants” almost daily. When people hear that Chef Marcos and Chef Rojas and I talk almost daily they are surprised. “why would competitors be friendly and help each other out?” Well, if you think about it, we need each other, we need to grow our hospitality culture away from corporate chains and “frozen to the plate” restaurants, to more sustainable, farm to table chef driven restaurants like the Red Door, the Nutwood and 1961.

We try to take it a few steps deeper by advocating a congruent attitude to all that we do, whether we are talking food, wine, beer, cocktails, but also professional services; how we hire and how we choose our suppliers and services. So, in that vein, symbiotic marketing, working with Grove Roots, FitNiche, Ethos Coffee, organizations like PMOA, Explorations five, Florida Dance, Pace, LVIM and Viste; all combine to help us stay on task and widen through strengthening our commitment to stay craft-stay local- stay original.