From the Esther’s Kitchen Culinary Universe Comes a New Space, a French Bistro, and Something Very Fancy

From the Esther’s Kitchen Culinary Universe Comes a New Space, a French Bistro, and Something Very Fancy

Like hermit crabs queueing to move into new shells, Esther’s Kitchen and three successive restaurants are readying to open.

Down the street, he’s also taking over what had been a tie-dye store to open a second — less fancy — French restaurant. And, behind that, a cocktail bar. The plan has arguably been in the works, at least in Trees’s mind — for years. It starts taking shape on Friday, March 8.

When Esther’s Kitchen opened in 2018, the downtown neighborhood of the Arts District had few restaurant options, most notably Casa Don Juan with its melted cheese-laden Mexican food and the Makers & Finders coffee and empanada cafe. In the years since opening, Esther’s Kitchen has outgrown its cramped quarters on Casino Center Boulevard, which only seats 68 people, tightly. The kitchen has no room to put even a cappuccino machine for morning brunch. And Trees’s office, hardly long enough to fit a full-size desk, often shares space with luggage that customers bring in with them, en route to hotels or the airport.

The new Esther’s Kitchen takes over what had been the Retro Vegas vintage store. It’s a 5,000-square-foot building with a 1,000-square-foot loft, to which Trees added nearly 4,500 square feet of brand new kitchen space. The centerpiece is an $85,000 bread oven. Taking a note from Wolfgang Puck’s 1228 Main across the street, Trees is centralizing his bread-making — baking sourdough loves for Esther’s, focaccia for his Al Solito Posto restaurant, and burger buns for his Ada’s Food + Wine restaurant, all in one kitchen. The other new feature to the kitchen is an open-fire grill.

Trees’s vision is simple. He wants the new Esther’s Kitchen to keep doing what it had been doing — but with a little more breathing room. More room for tables that aren’t squeezed in next to each other. More room at a bar so diners don’t feel pressure to give up their seat to the small crowd waiting just behind them. And more room in the kitchen for his staff. “Right now, if we do the same amount of business as we’re doing right now, we’re still profitable,” says Trees. “So there’s no real onus to push the door super hard.”

On Friday, the staff from Esther’s Kitchen will walk around the corner from the old spot on South Casino Center Boulevard to their new digs at 1131 South Main Street, carrying with them the restaurant’s tables and chairs. The same furniture and dishware will go into a spacious dining room coated in cool tones of deep blue, light green, and wood — all catching the light of the table-height windows that run along the building’s perimeter.

A bar with counter-height seating lives on the right side of the 187-seat restaurant. The restaurant’s center has a small kitchen with a pizza oven decorated with tiles from the first iteration of Esther’s. Behind it is a window that peers into the main kitchen, so customers can watch as pasta is made or as branzino grills above an open fire. To the left is a private dining area with a moveable glass partition. And directly above the private room is the loft. When it opens later this year, the loft will function as a vibey retro-styled lounge where bartenders will mix small-batch cocktails. The restaurant even has a small closet for storing the inevitable suitcase. Trees says the entire build-out cost about $7 million.

Trees is bringing in executive chef Sean O’Hara, a veteran of kitchens at Jean-Georges and the French Laundry, to oversee the new Esther’s. The move frees Trees up to open his two French restaurants later this year, as early as this fall.

When Bar Bohème opens, Trees says that every day at 4 p.m., staff clad in black vests and white shirts will carry baguettes from the oven at Esther’s Kitchen down Main Street to 1401 South Main Street. “If you go to Paris, and you’re walking around in the morning, the smell of baguette is in the air,” says Trees. “It makes it special. We want to bring some of that to Main Street.” Behind Bar Bohème, Trees will open a small cocktail bar, La Petite Bohème. The set-up will be similar to that of the Atomic Liquors bar next to the Kitchen at Atomic.

The former Esther’s Kitchen is transforming into a 35-seat tasting-menu restaurant. (“It’s super fine dining high-end gastronomy, what my background is,” says Trees.) The restaurant will undergo a renovation before re-emerging as a new restaurant, getting a redesign throughout.

Finally, Trees plans to start hosting farmers markets in an outdoor event space next the Esther’s Kitchen, which would be an exciting addition to a neighborhood that currently has no grocery store. He foresees attracting farmers to provide produce, bread from Esther’s and from Puck’s 1228 Main across the street, and maybe even a butcher, eventually.

It all culminates in a big swing for a neighborhood that is still developing an identity — at least from a food and beverage perspective. Even early adopters to the neighborhood, like Velveteen Rabbit and ReBar, have only been open since 2012 and 2016, respectively. The neighborhood is now home to enough breweries to earn the nickname “Brewery Row” from the city, and the new Colorado Building will debut a handful of new bars and restaurants this year.

“If we start bringing in chains or doing copycat things, or doing things that could exist anywhere else, it’ll take away from the specialness of Main Street, from the specialness of the Arts District,” says Trees. “Every time we add something, it’s got to add to what makes the Arts District special.”