At age 8, Wichita’s Public at the Brickyard expands service, changes menu, adds chef
Public at the Brickyard opened in 2012, and since then, it’s become a favorite Old Town dining destination.
Now, eight years in to the business, owners Drew Thompson and Travis and Brooke Russell are ready to introduce their customers to Public 2.0.
When the restaurant reopened in mid-May after coronavirus shutdowns, it introduced some big changes. Among them: A new executive chef, a new menu and a new plan to expand food service to the entirety of the massive, open-air space at the adjacent Brickyard — a roof-free live music destination that Travis Russell’s parents, Mark and Joni, opened in 1999.
Travis Russell said that, even before the coronavirus pandemic hit, he and his partners have been making plans to expand food service to The Brickyard. For years, he said, customers have been asking why they couldn’t eat on its big patio.
“There had long been sort of an issue of people coming in at beautiful times of year and saying, ‘Hey, I want to sit out there. Why can’t I have Public food out there?’” he said. “But in full disclosure, we just couldn’t handle the volume with the way we’d designed our menu.”
The owners knew they’d have to redesign the menu if they wanted to make an expansion work, and they decided to find a consultant who could help.
Mutual friends introduced them to Remy Ayesh, a seasoned chef on hiatus in Wichita who most recently had launched three restaurants under one roof at the Crossroads Hotel in Kansas City.
She and Russell got together and designed a new “sushi-style” menu for the restaurant. It doesn’t include sushi — rather it’s a paper menu listing the items Public is serving that invites customers to mark beside each dish how many they want to order. The style of the new menu not only helps the kitchen move quickly, Russell said, but it also reduces contact between servers and customers in the age of coronavirus.
The new menu, which you can see below, includes iterations of some of Public’s longtime favorites, including spicy cauliflower, sliders and brisket tacos, but each of the dishes has been updated.
It lists some new Bao Buns, inspired by a recent culinary obsession of Travis Russell’s, as well as pizzas, salads and a burger.
“We’ll probably expand that menu if things ever normalize again,” Russell said. “That’s the base of it, but we’ll spread it back out and do some more things. But this is the style of the food and tone of what we’re doing.”
The kitchen now has three chefs: Travis Russell, Ayesh and sous chef Jodi Comely.
Public, which recently reopened its indoor dining room with limited seating, has 100 seats inside at full, non-coronavirus capacity and will add another 60 or so on the patio.
The restaurant is not serving lunch yet but it does have brunch on Saturdays and Sundays. Its hours for now are 4 to 9 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays; 4 to 10 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturdays and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sundays.
Public at the Brickyard’s new menu
This story was originally published June 16, 2020 at 12:16 PM.
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