01/22/2020
The End of Legume...and the Beginning of Something New
Dear Friends,
It is with a mix of sadness, relief, and excitement that we announce Legume’s last service will be on February 29th, Leap Day.
There is sadness because Legume is our baby. We’ve loved working with our team and have taken tremendous pleasure in watching it grow and evolve into something far more amazing than anything we could have done ourselves.
We’re relieved because Legume is a beastly baby, a project of younger ambitions which has become increasingly difficult to run.
Excitement abounds because the end of Legume clears the way for a new beginning. We are excited to compost Legume into something even better and with the advantage of thirteen and a half years of hindsight.
The conditions from which Legume was born have changed radically in the past four years. Operating costs have gone up at the same time the restaurant market has become oversaturated. This has led us to run Legume with a skeleton crew over the past year. Running Legume this way has led to managers and other staff being spread too thin. Cracks in our ability to consistently maintain high standards have begun to show, and we see how operating this way is wearing on many of our staff. Our team is doing an amazing job given the circumstances, but things aren’t set up right now to keep the creative energy flowing. We find ourselves at a fork in the road: either double down and make Legume even more fine dining-ish and thus more exclusive than it already is, or bring it to a close and go in a direction that is a little more laid back (though informed by the same energy and principles) and less weighed-down by fine dining formalities.
Since our hearts are more inclined to feed a lot of people good food than to maintain fine dining trappings, the choice was obvious. When we looked back and reflected on what has made our guests happy over the years, we realized it hasn’t been the fine dining nature of Legume, or the more ambitious dishes we make that get people excited. It has always been the straight-ahead things like the zurek, duck confit, pierogies, beef tartare, chicken paprikash, cherry pie, chocolate cake, beef and kimchi soup, sour dill pickles, bluefish pate, lamb steak and other simple things that we hear about. These things aren’t going anywhere.
The new restaurant will mash up everything that is great about Legume, Pie For Breakfast and Butterjoint into one restaurant that is open every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The name will be Butterjoint All Day, though it is no more Butterjoint than it is Pie For Breakfast or Legume. (What is now Pie For Breakfast will become a coffee shop and bakehouse.)
Please stay tuned to our newsletter for updates as to what this is actually going to look like. We like to announce things there first, as a reward for those who read Trevett’s endless ramblings. Sign up here: https://legumebistro.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=c84193d14db8da24f3431c0b0&id=d9377b88cd
If you have questions, please send them to [email protected] so we can compile a list of the most frequently asked questions and include them in the newsletter and on the website as well. There is one question, however, that many of you may have that we want to answer right now, and that is: YES, Legume gift certificates and POPS will still be honored at Butterjoint All Day and at Pie For Breakfast.
We are so grateful for the support Pittsburgh has given us over the past thirteen and a half years and look forward to serving the community for many more years to come. That’s what this is all about. We want our restaurant to be a vibrant, happy place to visit, and that begins with keeping it a vibrant and happy place to work.
To an exciting new chapter,
Trevett and Sarah Hooper
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