While most restaurant owners are content to do battle with the rest of the marketplace, Patrick McCafferty, owner of Slims in Northside, is apparently intent on competing with himself. McCafferty has opened a second restaurant, VOUT, in the exact same space as Slims.
This is not to say that Slims is defunct - the restaurant McCafferty opened seven years ago in Northside will now only be open Friday and Saturday nights. In the same space on Tuesday through Thursday, from 5:30 to close, McCafferty will operate VOUT as an entirely new restaurant concept.
"I wanted a name which reflected what we're trying to do here with the food at both Slims and VOUT," McCafferty explained. "The staff and menus and pricing are completely different but both restaurants share a common philosophy about the food being served and the manner in which it is prepared."
The name of the 'new' restaurant was inspired by 1940's jazz musician (and original namesake for Slim's) Slim Gaillard's hip-speak called 'vout', and according to McCafferty translates variously "as to age, cure, patina, season, marinate, stew, pickle, ferment, braise, pass the time in reverie, vegetate, recycle, compost, distill, mutate, survive, evolve, endure, mature, prevail, steep…"
While Slims will continue to offer its popular
prix fixe menu, VOUT will offer an a la carte menu focusing on Cuban and Puerto Rican inspired dishes.
The menu at VOUT is also a nod to Slims earlier days- McCafferty opened the restaurant with no business phone, no reservations, and no liquor license - when the food was a little less refined and the service more casual. Both restaurants feature produce grown by McCafferty in his nearby inner city greenhouses.
McCafferty states that both Slims and VOUT "represent the new urban restaurant - a micro-farm on blighted, abandoned, re-claimed inner city property mere blocks from the restaurants it supports."
"And not only does the farm provide foodstuffs, it also bolsters and braces the menu, creates culinary opportunities, teaches and defines a place," he adds.
VOUT/Slims is located at 4046 Hamilton Avenue.
Writer: Michael Kearns
Photography by Scott Beseler
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