Wilmington’s fine dining scene is exploding. With barely a chain in sight, independent restaurants are taking over – rivaling the Philly dining scene. Make sure to support your favorite Downtown restaurants participating in the 17th annual City Restaurant Week (May 23-28) Sample a variety of different cuisines at lunch ($15) and dinner ($35), gratuity not included.
View participating restaurants and their unique offerings. Reservations recommended.
In celebration of City Restaurant week and Downtown’s independent restaurants, we reached out to Executive Chef and Partner of Le Cavalier, Tyler Akin to discuss the Independent Restaurant Collaition (IRC), a group he co-founded to save independent restaurants during the pandemic, and share a behind the scenes look into the IRC x Wilmington dinner series.
Tyler Akin
Chef-Partner of Le Cavalier and Co-founder of the Independent Restaurant Coalition.
Image courtesy of Neal Santos.
“D-Day. The Reckoning. The Day That Restaurants Closed. The end of the “before-times”. March 16, 2020 has been called many things. As restaurateurs, chefs, managers, servers, cooks, dishwashers, and everyone in between grappled with this catastrophic moment, so too was the Independent Restaurant Coalition already being birthed. Industry luminaries like Will Guidara of Eleven Madison Mark, Jose Andres, Kevin Boehm, Tom Colicchio, culinary super agent Andrew Chason, Andrew Zimmern and a few others had the foresight to gather and organize in the face of COVID’s existential challenge. It was a moment of dire uncertainty amidst mass closures and the founding members of IRC realized that independent restaurants nationwide—uniquely vulnerable to this kind of shock—needed their own voice in Washington as federal relief programs began to take shape.
The twice-daily Zoom meetings included many chefs and restaurateurs who were my own heroes in this difficult profession. Those sessions became a mixed format of commiseration, group therapy, and, most importantly, crash courses in non-profit fundraising and congressional policymaking. We immediately discovered an important, albeit perverse, lesson: it costs a lot of money to have a loud voice in our democracy. Deep commitment, mobilization, and organizing alone don’t buy access and good counsel. As various viral surges ebbed and flowed, IRC’s initial underwriters and politicians alike came to believe that the worst of the pandemic was over. The checks got smaller and our elected representatives began to ask questions like “Didn’t you get two rounds of PPP?” and “Aren’t you busy again?” But the devastation was only just beginning to become clear, with tens if not hundreds of thousands of restaurants closing and the survivors being newly saddled with massive debts that were incurred to weather all kinds of local dining restrictions and obliterated consumer sentiment.
So when Dave Pollin and Rob Buccini of The Buccini/Pollin Group said they wanted to tell a story to the world that Wilmington is a city of independent restaurants, it felt natural to make IRC itself the beneficiary of this effort. Enter IRC x Wilmington, a 5-part series of dinners and brunches taking place from December through March at Downtown Wilmington independent restaurants. We paired celebrity chef founding members of IRC with local chefs in order to remind the community just how vital these establishments are to the community’s economy and culture, and to spotlight the fact that some restaurants had benefited from the initial, underfunded round of the SBA’s Restaurant Revitalization Fund (RRF). But the fight had always continued, with Washington having left so many behind while giving a lifeline to others in a tragically randomized process. Not all of the city’s indies hosted, but they were all with us in spirit.
These events brought Top Chef’s Tom Colicchio, Travel Channel’s Andrew Zimmern, Raleigh’s Ashley Christensen, Portland’s Gregory Gourdet, and New York City’s Russ & Daughters for one-time-only dining experiences that the community so clearly craved and embraced. They all sold out almost as soon as tickets were released, at prices as high as $275 per person. Those chefs collaborated with Antimo DiMeo of Bardea, Dwain Kalup of La Fia, Jen Carrol of Spice Finch, Dan Sheridan of Stitch House, Jim Burke of the forthcoming boutique hotel project on Market street, and myself. Many of them stayed for a few days and enjoyed the attractions in our own backyard of which we are so proud, and I know for a fact walked away from the visit with a new appreciation for Wilmington.
The result? Over $100,000 raised for IRC to continue its fight for independent restaurant relief. And notably, with the help of Foxglove Communications, regional and national recognition for Wilmington’s thriving independent restaurant scene. If the RRF does get replenished—which we still hope it will—the critical funding provided by this series will have played no small part in that outcome. Wilmington should be proud!”
Experience the flavors of North Africa and Provence created by Chef Akin at Le Cavalier. Click here to view the menu or make a reservation.