Chef Kate Williams Next Move
Excited to see what Chef Kate brings to the table. We have dined at Republic and enjoyed everything they had to offer. This building has so much potential. Like her, I am a fan of the garage, little out of the ordinary feel.
(Photo: Sylvia Rector, Detroit Free Press)
You might expect chef Kate Williams to open her future restaurant, the sweetly named Lady of the House, in a stately Victorian or a lace-curtained bungalow. But Williams, former chef of the high-profile Republic restaurant in downtown Detroit, has never been the predictable type.
So it should come as no surprise that her intended location, revealed this week, is an old cinder-block garage with a curving yellow front, surrounded by a chain-link fence at 14th and Perry streets in North Corktown.
She noticed the place when she moved into the neighborhood seven months before Republic opened, she says, and despite its outward appearance, found love at first sight. “I said, ‘That’s my restaurant. That’s what I want to be in,’ ” she recalls.
The ambitious, tavern-like Republic opened after lengthy delays last February in the restored Grand Army of the Republic building at Cass and Grand River. Williams left suddenly three months later, saying she wanted to pursue another opportunity, but both she and Republic’s owners said they parted on good terms.
Until this week, she had kept details of her next plans under wraps.
Lady of the House will be a smaller, more personal project than Republic, she says. “I want it to be like my dining room. It’s why I like to cook and be in this industry — I wanted to be the ultimate hostess, to have people come and break bread together,” she says.
Including the small bar, the restaurant will seat no more than 40. “It’s a very unique concept. The business model doesn’t work unless it’s sort of an intimate setting,” she says. The menu will be her kind of food: “local and farm-based, with a European influence. … My style is kind of rustic-elegant — not casual dining but not white tablecloth.”
Lady of the House will occupy about half of the 4,000-square-foot building, including a rounded corner room with tall windows, now hidden by panels of welded-metal triangles. An extra-tall front garage door can be opened to connect the interior to a large front patio. The rounded corner space will become a bar and café that opens earlier than the dining room to serve drinks and snacks, she says. The kitchen will be open to diners’ view.
Williams was never interested in locating in Midtown or downtown; she preferred to open in her neighborhood, she says. “North Corktown doesn’t have many places to eat, and there are a lot of people who live here. It (will be) a place for the neighborhood to come and enjoy themselves.”
The project is still in the rezoning process, she said, and she is working with architects to see what work the building will need. She hopes to hope as early as July.
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