Dom's: Rewiring a Chicago Food Legacy
Interview with co-founder Jay Owen on a new concept with deep family ties
Dom’s Kitchen: Rewiring a Chicago Food Legacy
Anticipation can be a powerful marketing tool, and Dom’s Kitchen and Market received a lot of coverage in the months prior to its June 8 grand opening on Chicago’s North Side (see Local Food Forum’s article with photos of the opening ceremony).
Part of this is the pedigree of the co-founders. Bob Mariano was CEO of the Chicago-based Dominick’s supermarkets in the 1990s and then of the Milwaukee-based Roundy’s chain for which he created the Mariano’s stores. Jay Owen is co-founder of DOM Capital Group: The name is a tribute to his grandfather, Dominick DiMatteo, who built the Dominick’s chain into a regional force from 1950 until his death in 1993.
The other reason is Dom’s innovative 21st century wrinkle in food retailing. Its 17,000 square foot space houses a curated grocery (with meat and cheese counters, a bakery, a beer/wine/spirits section, and food products of the type sold at chains such as Whole Foods Market). There is also a food court with a Bonci outlet (pizza cut with scissors and sold by weight); a coffee bar that also serves beer, wine and cocktails in the evening; and other stands selling prepared meals, sandwiches, salads and sushi. And it is part convenience store with a broad selection of grab-and-go items.
It appears that the founders hit a sweet spot. Opening just three days before Chicago fully reopened — ending 15 months of COVID shutdowns — Dom’s has been buzzy in the three weeks since. [Disclaimer: The store on the border of Lincoln Park and Lakeview is near where I live and I have already become a regular.]
The following are excerpts from an interview I conducted with Jay Owen at the store on June 24. Along with his grandfather’s legacy, Jay has a food history of his own: His venture capital firm has invested in farm-to-table pioneer Chef Rick Bayless and his Frontera restaurant group; Freshii, a wellness-conscious fast-casual chain; and Farmer’s Fridge, a fast-growing Chicago business based on the principle that healthy and delicious salads, sandwiches and bowls should be easily accessible to people wherever they are.
BTW, Dom’s executives maintain a presence on the store floor, dressed in the all-black staff uniform. So if you walk up to a handsome young man to ask where the chips and hummus are, he might just be a co-owner.
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Q: Every story is about the store mentions that you are Dominick's grandson. But nobody really explores what the legacy is there. Of course, Bob [Mariano] also worked for years for your grandfather. What's the link across time between Dominick's and Dom's?
A: The family sold [Dominick’s] in 1995 to a private equity firm and then ultimately ended up in the hands of Safeway [which shut the chain in 2013]. From 1995 until today, the family had no involvement in Dominick's or the grocery industry for that matter.
Really the bridge is the firm that I created about 12 years ago with my brother Tony that is called DOM Capital. And DOM Capital was created to invest in emerging food and food technology businesses…That experience, having built a number of businesses over the past 10 years, certainly shaped and informed Dom's Kitchen and Market.
Dom's Kitchen and Market is an idea that came together between Bob Mariano and me about three years ago. It was partially based on my experience in the restaurant industry and observing that it was changing, restaurants were looking for ways to reach their customers outside of the four walls of their restaurant… You saw restaurants starting to sell grocery items.
That made us start to think about what a world look like where people weren't necessarily making the distinction between restaurant and grocery. They were really trying to answer the question of How do I feed myself? What do I want for dinner? And where do I get it? Maybe today it could be a restaurant, tomorrow it could be going into a market and picking up something that I prepare myself. And so that brought the idea: What if we put it all in one place and didn't make that distinction between a restaurant and a grocery store and said, it's a kitchen and a market, it's both of those things…
We very deliberately chose the name Dom's because we wanted to evoke this history and legacy of Dominick's and also what it stood for in the Chicago market. But we also wanted to do it in a way that it was clear that this wasn't just an evolution of what Dominick's was. This is a completely new, completely revolutionary idea of how to bring both a kitchen and a market together. But at the same time we felt like linking it back to the the legacy of Dominick's gave us a certain level of authenticity in the eyes of our customer…
Q: How close this is to the original conception three years ago when you were sitting over a table with Bob like this?
A: In some ways it's liberating to design something with a blank sheet of paper. But in other ways it's overwhelming. And so to get to where we are today, we went through multiple iterations and we went through three different design firms [the final one being The Rockwell Group based in New York City].
The challenge that we were trying to solve was how do we bring a kitchen or a restaurant together with a grocery store, and feel like they come together in a seamless way. What we didn't want to happen, and I think this is what a lot of grocery stores have tried to do, it's a grocery store and then they just sort of drop in a restaurant, and it doesn't really seem to communicate with the rest of the store. It's like a pop-up restaurant inside a grocery store.
We wanted the kitchen to communicate to the rest of the store. So to the degree that we had seasonal items in the produce department that we were featuring, we also wanted to be able to do things with those in the kitchen. Same thing with our bakery or our meat and seafood. They all had to work together. From a design standpoint that was a real challenge for us…
The other thing that we had to design around is that this is a small store, it’s 17,000 feet, we don't have a lot of extra space. We don't have a lot of backroom space. We don't have a lot of room for preparation. And so we had to think through the fact that we're running really six different restaurants inside this store, how do we allow for those restaurants to to do the necessary preparation that you would typically have in the back of a restaurant. So that presented a unique challenge of how to fit everything into the store in a small package.
In the end we were really excited about and feel really good about the design. I think there are there are always things that you feel like maybe you didn't get quite right. But I'd say in general we feel like we got a lot of it right.
It's a process and Store 2 will be informed by Store 1. And Stores 3 and 4 and 5 will be even better as we learn how customers are going to shop this store, as we get feedback from people, we get feedback from our team members who are working in the store and telling us what's working and what's not. So you're going to see this evolve over time.
Q: Did you always have your your eye on this corner? Or did you get a design and say okay well, there's this place that could really use an upgrade and we'll make it fit.
A: It started with an evaluation of who our target customer was and we spent a lot of time thinking about who do we want to be walking into the store every day.
Once we had an understanding of who was going to be shopping the store, then we could start to look for locations in the city… This one ultimately came through that process. We secured the site about a year ago.
We feel we feel great about it. Having 20 spaces of parking directly in front of it is unique in the city, being half a block from the [Diversey] L stop is unique, being close to the lake. We’re at the corner of two very high-traffic streets with Diversey and Halsted… And so we draw people from Lakeview from the north. We draw people from Lincoln Park and south. But the other thing that we're finding that was somewhat surprising to us is that we're getting a lot of people who are driving here from other parts of the city and even from the suburbs. So we've become also a destination.
Q: With the restaurants, Bonci is an established restaurant that you brought in but everything else and a lot of everything else around the store is house-brand.
A: We view ourselves as being curators. We want to bring the best products, no matter where they come from, into this store. But at the same time, we also felt it was really important to establish Dom's as the brand. We want to instill confidence in our customers that we are making the right choices on their behalf. We want to create a relationship of trust with our customers and we need to have them trust in our brand. And so that was something that was very, very important for us.
Bonci is a great example of a partnership that we that we engaged in. Because truth be told, we always admired them. I had known Bonci for many years, and I thought that they were far and away the best pizza in Chicago. And the truth is that we actually tried to recreate Bonci and we couldn't. And so what we said was, why don't we just invite them into the store and partner with them and we did. It's been a fantastic partnership.
Q: It's such a unique experience too, because 99 percent of people haven’t had their pizza cut with scissors.
A: For sure. It's a unique experience, it's beautiful to look at it. It also fits into the whole culinary theater that we want to create.
We're in the business of creating great food and great culinary experiences here. That Bonci relationship fits very nicely into that. But if you look around the store, we have a lot of suppliers and vendor partners but we don't necessarily call them out. Looking at the bakery here right next to me and the donuts that come from Stan’s and the cupcakes that we get from Molly's Cupcakes, the cakes that we get from West Town Bakery. These are all partners to us, but we were very clear with them that we're not going to hide our relationship with them — if customers ask we'll be happy to share where we get the products — but we're not going to call it out in the store, it's going to be our brand.
Q: What is your approach to local sourcing? Local businesses are integral to the community.
A: And they need a place to go right now. Where do those businesses get launched? You know from your work that the playbook once upon a time was you started a specialty food business and the first stop was always to go to one of the Whole Foods stores. They would take you in a couple of their stores, and then to the degree that they were successful, they would roll you out in the region. And then if it was successful in the region, they would think about moving you to another region. And that was always the playbook. When Amazon bought Whole Foods, the door kind of shut for a lot of these emerging newer challenger brands that were being created. Our hope is that Dom’s is that place where those entrepreneurs can get exposure and find and get connected to their customers.
Q: How do vendors who are interested in Dom’s establish that relationship?
A: We have a great merchandising organization, three very experienced merchandisers who are constantly evaluating new brands. So I would encourage entrepreneurs and small food businesses to reach out to our merchandising team through our website and get connected with us, or through their distributor and get on our schedule for our next reset. You’re going to see is things moving in and out of the store on a more regular basis than you would see in other stores. We always want to be introducing customers to new innovative brands and new innovative ideas. And so we’re always looking.
Q: One place where you're going against the current is that you don’t have delivery. Obviously for your concept to work you need the synergy of people walking around the store and seeing this and that. How well will that work during Chicago winter? Do you think Dom’s will be established enough to be a go-to place when people want to get out of their house when it's not so ambient?
A: We've never said no delivery. What we've said and what we decided is we will offer delivery when we're ready to do it. First off, we wanted to get the store open and established because we felt like in order to build the brand, we needed a physical store. We view this as the hub where people get to know us and they get to know the products that we sell, they get to know the types of food that we're making in the store, they get introduced to the menus that we have here, and hopefully they fall in love with Dom's.
What you're going to see happen in the next two weeks is we're going to turn on our mobile ordering tool, and that mobile ordering tool will initially be set up for The Brew, our coffee bar. It will allow customers to go on to our app and pre-order coffee or any type of breakfast items and it will be ready when you walk into the store, like you would at other coffee shop. That will be our first step in e-commerce.
The next thing that will happen after that, we’ll turn on mobile ordering for the other parts of the kitchen and we'll do it venue by venue. So if you look at our sandwich concept, which is called the Stackup, it'll allow you to pre-order a sandwich.
The next phase of will be going into curbside. So not only will you be able to walk in and pick up something pre-ordered, we're going to have the ability for you to pull up in your car and we will run the products out to you. It will start with things from the kitchen and will slowly move into products from the market. It won't be the entire store, but it will be a select number of products that we will sell from the market that will complement items you can get from the kitchen.
The next step in that evolution will ultimately lead to delivery. One of the tenets that Bob and I put forward when we created this business is that we didn't love how when you walk into other grocery stores, you had shoppers running around the store filling baskets on behalf of customers. We felt like it took away from the shopping experience of actual customers who are in the store. We said we don't want that experience for our customers.
So when you see us do delivery, it's most likely going to be from another location. We're evaluating those things right now, most likely some sort of a micro-fulfillment warehouse, or in the case of the kitchen, it will get delivered out of a commissary or a ghost kitchen and go directly to the customer and never come into the store. Which frankly we would view as being the future of delivery anyway.
Q: How long do you feel you need to test drive the concept of the store? Because I know you have a very ambitious expansion plan.
A: Store number 2 will be sometime in the spring of next year. Store number 3 will be sometime before the end of next year. So we're going to end 2022 with three stores open. That's our plan. We're learning from this store every day. The management team is walking this store every day, identifying what do we do right, what do we need to fix, what do we need to learn for store 2 every day.
Q: You and Bob and the other executives are all out here, all dressed as staff. You're not sitting in some corner office somewhere.
A: That goes back to Dominick’s. If you go back and look at Dominick DiMatteo and how he operated his business, he was in the stores every day. And he was shoulder to shoulder with the other team members there. And so all of us who have grown up in that world, that's the only way we know how to operate…
Training is important too. We have an entirely new staff here, these people have only been working in the store for a couple of weeks. And so training is an important component of us being successful and making sure that we have a great team who understand what we're doing and understand customer service and are willing to roll their sleeves up and do hard work every day. All that comes from the top.