An exterior view of Como Dockside
Matty O’Reilly hasn’t stopped thinking about the Como Dockside space for three years. He was in the running for the lakeside pavilion spot when Black Bear Crossing closed, but lost out to the Dockside concept, which subsequently closed last November. It was just announced that he and his crew will be taking over the space and relaunching it as Spring Café, hopefully by April.
O’Reilly also runs the Red River Kitchen at City House, another city-owned property, and he’s placed his Republic out at the airport, so he’s no stranger to writing proposals and handling a lengthy approval process. “I sat through a two-hour committee meeting and by the end, I rejected it. Many people wanted the same thing, for it to be a coffee shop in the morning and be open every day, all year,” O’Reilly told me. “It’s not viable. I have 20 years of experience doing this, and I wasn’t going to say yes to something that I knew wasn’t going to work in the end.” The rent structure and labor cost would make a 14,000 sq. ft. coffee shop an albatross in winter, when the few people coming in wouldn’t likely meet the cost to staff and run the place. But a compromise was reached, “and I think we can take what people loved about Black Bear Crossing and what worked with Como Dockside, and make something special.”
Spring Café will be open from 11 a.m to 9 p.m. every day, from approximately Mother’s Day through Labor Day (there is some flexibility there). The rest of the year, it will be open on Saturday–Sunday from 9 a.m.-–3 p.m. for brunch. “Why not just do a killer brunch? We’ll have a bloody bar and just give people a really great reason to come down on the weekends.”
JD Fratzke is working on the menu, and their main focus is to create a menu that is family-friendly and accessible. Think sandwiches, burgers, fries, brats, salads, and such. O’Reilly said it will be a different menu from Red River Kitchen, “otherwise JD would get bored! But there might be a crossover every once in a while, that Cubano should probably make an appearance over there.” The menu will be built for efficiency. That was one of the complaints from Dockside, people would queue up and have long waits for food that was just too timely to prepare.
The space will change too. The bar is essentially going away. “When you walked into the old space it felt like a dark tavern or a pub, it just wasn’t family-friendly enough for this park.” O’Reilly plans to turn the bar into the service counter and grab-n-go station, in order to re-jigger the flow to the outside tables. There will still be cocktails on tap, kegged wine, beers, and ciders available, but there won’t be bar seating, just tables. “You know, the beauty of batched cocktails, besides the fact that there’s less waste and more quality control, is that it’s also harder to overserve someone, there are no extra shots involved, ever.”
O’Reilly is also counting on some partnerships to make the space work, he’s in the process of bringing in an ice cream vendor, a booking agent for bands, and most importantly, a catering company. There’s an event space on the third floor that overlooks the lake and is ready to go, but the former tenants didn’t use it that often. O’Reilly thinks that if he can partner up with a catering company, and bring the costs down, they can do weddings every weekend, all year.
One of the reasons he originally wanted the space three years ago, was his own feelings about the building. He used to live in the Hamline area and would take his infant daughter for walks around the lake. When he told him mom about the impending deal, she recounted stories from her own childhood, remembering taking paddle boat rides on the lake with her parents. One thing Matty O’Reilly is quite good at is honoring the bones and histories of a place he takes over. See his Bar Brigade in the former Ristorante Luci, his Republic in the old Sgt. Preston’s, even his work on restoring the Dan Kelly’s Pub before he sold it. I think the city and neighborhood have a good bet with this one.
