JAVA Oct 2018
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Phoenix continues to burst at the seams with new dining establishments.<br />
The target market for brick-and-mortar ventures has grown well beyond<br />
Roosevelt Row toward Grand Avenue and is reaching further, crawling<br />
up Central Avenue, inching east into the Garfield neighborhood and even<br />
creeping south into the warehouse district.<br />
One of the newest downtown Phoenix eateries, The Larry, is situated inside the<br />
Lawrence Building (also home to the Galvanize Center for Entrepreneurship) on Grant<br />
Street in the otherwise austere historic warehouse district. The district is primarily a<br />
hub for office space – housing forward-thinking companies like WebPT, ad agencies,<br />
design firms and the like, but certainly not known as a dining or entertainment<br />
destination.<br />
Owners Kyu (pronounced “Q”) Utsunomiya and Troy Watkins first opened Be Coffee<br />
+ Food + Stuff in the small café space inside monOrchid Gallery. The coffee shop has<br />
been in operation since 2014. Within a year, Utsunomiya and Watkins began working<br />
on their next concept, converting the adjacent Dressing Room, an old performance<br />
space and tiny music venue, into the Dressing Room restaurant. They added on<br />
a front and back patio and built a full kitchen. The Dressing Room has been in<br />
operation for almost two years. During that time, Utsunomiya and Watkins have<br />
been hustling – getting one project off the ground and then immediately dreaming<br />
up the next.<br />
But Utsunomiya says that being so, so busy (almost too busy for a quick interview)<br />
is a good problem to have. Their new concept, the Larry, was built out and opened<br />
earlier this summer; it’s the third brick-and-mortar under their Conceptually Social<br />
umbrella. Utsunomiya and Watkins will maintain their business headquarters at<br />
monOrchid. Utsunomiya says, “As much as we continue to grow, Be Coffee and<br />
the Dressing Room are still fundamentally our flagships.”<br />
Their catering company, also called Conceptually Social, was created in<br />
conjunction with Dressing Room. The team found that when it came time to make<br />
food for larger-scale social gatherings and other corporate events at monOrchid<br />
and elsewhere, there was simply not enough kitchen space available in Be and
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