Imagine if a deli and a bodega were joined in holy matrimony to create a place that serves Italian subs wrapped in butcher paper and breakfast sandwiches after 11 a.m. Maybe you could grab a black coffee, too, and a scoop of ice cream for dessert. That place exists and it’s called Elm Street Social Club (ESSC). It’s the collaboration of three culinary transplants: Jordan Anthony-Brown, Mikey Fabian and Willa Pelini, who became friends working in Washington, D.C.’s food scene.
Jordan moved to Cincinnati from D.C. at the beginning of 2020 to open his initial project, The Aperture, located in the Paramount building in Walnut Hills. In optics, the aperture is the mechanism that lets light in. In Walnut Hills, The Aperture will be a place where guests “feel warm and illuminated,” Anthony-Brown says, “but the experience will be a balanced one.” He plans to focus on mezze-style cuisine — vegetable-centric dishes that flow from light to heavy in order of service.
But after COVID hit, he decided to put The Aperture on hold.
“It’s a pretty ambitious project,” he says. “It’s going to require our full attention.”
Instead of opening a full-service restaurant in the midst of a pandemic, he decided to pivot his energy to something simpler that could operate in a to-go only environment. In June, Anthony-Brown got wind of an opportunity to run a pop-up out of the now-defunct Social OTR space and went for it. By the time ESSC was taking shape, Anthony-Brown’s wife was due to have their first child.
“I was still trying to gain some momentum, get the word out there, but I was about at my capacity,” he says.
While he was spinning several plates in Cincinnati, Fabian and Pelini were overworked and underpaid in Washington, D.C.
“At that time I talked to Jordan every day of my life,” says Fabian, now the culinary director at ESSC. “I knew (his wife) was pregnant. I knew he was trying to start a restaurant. One day Willa said, ‘We should go to Cincinnati, see if Jordan needs help.’”
Within two months of making their minds up, they were driving from D.C. to Cincinnati to start this new chapter with Anthony-Brown.
As they were preparing for ESSC to officially open in September, the crew asked themselves, “What does the community need?” In a time when the weight of daily life feels unreasonably heavy, people have been seeking out comfort. ESSC responded to that need by washing their brand in nostalgia. All the sandwiches are named after 1980s movie references, there are fuchsia streamers in the window that give off a prom-in-the-gym vibe and they shuffle a 16-hour playlist spanning two decades, from the ’80s to the turn of the century.
The streamers can be credited to Pelini, who, when not churning out new ice cream flavor combos in the basement, works as the creative director at ESSC.
“I think what a lot of people are missing right now is going into a restaurant and feeling transported and not worrying about the rest of your life for two hours. So how do you translate that to now? And how do we make that safe?” she says.
All orders are placed online and taken to-go, so Pelini made sure the short amount of time you’ll be spending in the shop is pleasant. She fashioned an entryway out of some tables and fake — albeit lush — greenery so guests don’t walk into a dark, desolate, used-to-be dining room to pick up their sandwiches.
Something that people don’t need right now is a new, trendy, overly complex eatery. The menu is pared down and familiar: all-day breakfast and lunch sandwiches, scoops of ice cream, drinks to-go and specials on the weekends. Some sandwiches are old friends: the turkey club (The Bushwood), the Italian sub (The Bing), a weekend-only smashburger (The Dude). Others are reimagined favorites: deviled egg salad on toasted quinoa bread (The Baby) and a sandwich with brown butter collard greens as its core (The Axel F).
It all boils down to simple ideas executed with confidence.
“You can chase trends all you want, but you’ll fizzle out,” Fabian says. “You have to showcase good ingredients with solid technique. That’s pretty much all it takes.”
The three of them agree that simple is the way to go. It’s how they prefer to dine and how they’re running their business.
Their shared values have been shaped by their experience in the industry. Proper compensation, paid time off, health insurance, maintaining a safe and comfortable work environment — these all amount to leaving the industry better than they found it.
To ensure everyone is bringing home more than enough money to live, they’ve adopted a no-tipping model by adding a 20% service charge to all orders.
“We understand that if we’re going to charge this much, the experience must match the price,” Anthony-Brown says.
He explains that hospitality is not a one-way street, servers doting on guests who hold their tips over their heads. Choosing to have a no-tipping structure dissolves the illusion of servers and restaurant employees being servants to the guests.
“You’re entering a mutual contract when you dine out,” Anthony-Brown says. He uses the example of a dinner party. You wouldn’t complain about the food and make demands of your host, so why would you behave that way in a restaurant? Saying yes to every customer request, undercutting employees’ compensation and benefits to save a buck — these are business identity issues at the core, Anthony-Brown says.
“If we stick to our guns and we’re honest with ourselves about who we are and what we want to do, I think it’ll pay off,” he says.
The plan is to return full attention to The Aperture once it’s safe to pick that project back up and open a full-service dine-in restaurant. For now, Anthony-Brown, Fabian and Pelini are serving take-out sandwiches as long as it makes sense.
Elm Street Social Club, 1819 Elm St., Over-the-Rhine, elmstsocialclub.com
This article appears in Jan 1-31, 2021.