Our customers often came after dinner-hours for a post-meal nightcap. We starting snagging the dinner crowd and brunch crowds when we paired up with food trucks that could provide more gut-filling meals than our snack menu.
This came with a cache of challenges though — one, we couldn’t control the service experience customers had with the food trucks. The disposable oil-soaked plates and plastic-wrapped cutlery didn’t match our aesthetic, the food didn’t match the spirit of our cocktails, our production, or our branding. And while the food trucks brought customers during mealtimes, we didn’t catch any profit from the food sales and our average sales per table fell. People often saw us less like a unique dining experience in town and more like a concession shelter with an outdoor patio. We knew we had to open a kitchen and do things our way.
We tore down the wall that divided the kitchen from an office room. It was still a tiny space–more than three cooks in the kitchen is too many cooks in the kitchen. But we made up for this with top-of-the-line, dream appliances. Just like our first bartenders, we hired a strong chef and gave him creative reign. Same rule: our spirits are made from scratch, our cocktails are made from scratch, and so should our food. We had seen a hole in Bloomington’s cocktail scene and a chance to fill it with something unique, and we knew we could do this food.
Every dish is made to share, they cascade out over service, never disrupting conversation with an overwhelming amount of plates hitting the table at once. Rather than a giant entree stacked with a giant side, every dish is a delicious study of an ingredient — they are elegant, fresh, and unexpected.
Our kitchen elevates our customers’ experience at Cardinal without distracting from our bread & butter (alcohol, that is.) When our servers aren’t dropping off a bowl of house-made, hand-pulled seasoned mozzarella cheese, or a seasonal cocktail, they’re coming round with tastes of our spirits.
