Big changes at The Anchor, next door Douglas Avenue Chop Shop, including a new name

The big remodel she had planned for this summer is being pushed into the spring, but you’ll still notice some big changes at The Anchor, 1109 E. Douglas, and its next-door sister business Douglas Avenue Chop Shop.

As if this week, the two businesses have been combined into one with a new identity. They’ll be called The Anchor Meat Market.

Owner Schane Gross has just hired a new management team — including general manager Jared Browning, who helped open Dockum Apothecary at The Ambassador Hotel, and Alex Eftekhar, who just left his job as chef at Flint Hills National Golf Club — and she’s changing the way the two businesses operate and cooperate.

Next week, crews will knock down part of a wall that stands between The Anchor and the former chop shop, a boutique butcher shop Gross opened in 2014. They’ll create a four-foot-wide door that will join the two businesses together.

The Anchor’s east dining room will lose some seating with the creation of the passageway, but Gross will add seating on the butcher shop side.

Nothing else will change on the restaurant side.

Her new butcher shop manager Eftekhar and chef Dillon Narcisi will be offering a new menu that will feature signature deli sandwiches and other dishes focusing on the butcher shop products. People who dine at the butcher shop will be able to order beers from The Anchor side. People who dine at The Anchor will be able to order butcher shop menu items.

The butcher shop also will become more of a market, selling hot ready-to-eat meals and cold ready-to-bake meals — like lamb shank — as well as a few produce items. Gross and her managers say they hear all the time from downtown dwellers how much they want access to markets so that they don’t have to drive to the grocery store.

“What we’re trying to do is empower people to cook at home, to enjoy cooking at home,” Gross said.

All Anchor merchandise, including its popular T-shirts, will move to the butcher shop side, too, and it will start selling more “upscale boutique” meat items like tie-up roasts and meat cushions, which are de-boned cuts that are stuffed with various ingredients and tied up into a cushion-shaped finished product.

The butcher shop, which has been closed since Labor Day, will reopen on Friday of this week, Gross said. The door should be finished by Oct. 1.

Assembling her new management team has re-energized her, Gross said.

“I feel a synergy from it...” she said. “I think there’s something really cool here. I’m working with a responsible group of people who know what they’re doing and see what they have accessible to them to do some cool things they haven’t been able to do before.”

The Anchor remodel she discussed this spring, which will result in a new look, an expanded kitchen and a relocated bar, is still on and will likely be finished by May, Gross said.

She chose the name “The Anchor Meat Market” because of its playful double meaning: Her butcher shop, obviously, is a meat market, and bars like The Anchor are often referred to as “meat markets” by people on the dating scene.

The business will get a new sign next spring, Gross said, and in the short term, she’ll re-brand with new vinyl signage.

But don’t worry: The mermaid in the logo stays.

This story was originally published September 17, 2018 at 2:18 PM.