Atwater Village seems to be the hoppin’ for new restaurants and businesses these days – Links N Hops just opened, Bon Vivant Market is just weeks away. Up on the northern end of Glendale Boulevard in Atwater Village, just up the street from the Post Office and before the railroad tracks, will be a new restaurant called Thank You For Coming.
But Thank You For Coming isn’t exactly your typical restaurant – let’s call it more of an experimental food spot. Owners Laura Noguera, Jonathan Robert, Jenn Su Taohan, and Cynthia Su Taopi have created a unique floor plan where diners site on one side of a shared counter, with rotating cooks on the other, to encourage everyone to interact and create art. They describe it as:
Thank You For Coming will be run in a collaborative and participatory manner, which entails that staff will rotate by means of a residency program to give citizens with varying interests, desires and skills, an opportunity to cook for the public, be a farmer, play with a space, and experiment accordingly.
Ingredients will be grown in the adjacent garden for easy access from the kitchen, and a communal table will also fill up the room for the large, family style dinners.
To get things started, they used the online fundraiser website Kickstarter, and recently reached their goal of $10,000. Thank You For Coming was also awarded a $1,000 grant by Awesome Food (a chapter of the Awesome Foundation), which will help support the “restaurant.”
They plan to open up in June at 3416 Glendale Blvd. Looking forward to trying it out!
