Durham chef Matt Northup is comfortable cooking with a bit of contradiction: Take Redstart Foods, the meal-delivery and ingredient company that he opened in 2015. It’s a prepared meal service, sure, but as he stressed in an INDY profile in 2022, the meals he prepares fulfill a different niche than your average weeknight meal kit.
“Our whole thing has always been that just because we’re a prepared meal company, it doesn’t have to be lasagna every week,” said Northup. “We do things like that, too, but we also try to have more ambitious food.”
Customers have responded in kind: Northup says he and his team now fulfill around 300 orders in the Triangle every week out of the North Durham commercial kitchen where the business is based.
Now—as first reported by the News & Observer—Northup and his wife and business partner, the artist Jordan Grace Owens, are expanding with a dining and retail space at the storefront adjoining the kitchen. On a phone call, Northup says he hopes to open by mid-summer.
The new cafe is called Redstart Takeaway—though that doesn’t mean you actually have to take your meals away.
“You’ll be able to eat inside,” Northup clarified in a press release. “I understand that calling the business ‘Takeaway’ is confusing. I sort of like that too.”
Northup says that Takeaway will offer daily breakfast and lunch fare (including pastries from Union Special) alongside retail items that include grab-and-go Redstart meals and pantry goods. On weekends, Takeaway will have evening hours with a bar space that serves wine and beer and a dinner menu drawn from Redstart favorites.
To that point, recent playful, herbaceous features from the Redstart website menu include fried chicken cutlets with pimento labneh, hot honey & dill; fermented carrot hot sauce; and golden beets with orange mint.
Northup got his start with kitchen stints at Whole Foods, Pizzeria Toro, and Rose’s Meat Market and Sweet Shop before founding Redstart Foods. The business originally began as a catering service but shifted, as many food enterprises did, to a new model during the pandemic. The evolution stuck; now, it’s evolving again.
“Our goal is for Takeaway to feel like a neighborhood hangout and market,” Owens told the INDY over email. “Our family lives less than a mile from the location, and we’re kind of just opening the space we wish existed.”
Both Redstart enterprises are located off North Roxboro Street next to coffee/gallery space Perfect Lovers. Local butchery business MoonBelly Meats rents the commissary kitchen from Northup and will continue to share the space, he says. Northup says he plans to fix up the spacious patio in the back and open it for cafe use and that parking will be available in a Redstart lot behind the business.
“Redstart is known for food that’s surprising and weird (in the best way),” Owens said in the press release. “I hope to cultivate some of that same creative energy in the new space.”
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