595 Craft and Kitchen has added weekend brunch to its offerings, as the nine-year-old neighborhood craft beer bar prepares to expand to Southern Highlands.
The original 595, located near Rainbow Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue, has always had an ambitious food menu. And it now offers weekend brunch, opening early at 9:30 a.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Owner Van Nguyen says the idea has been discussed for several years, with the start of football season providing one reason to finally make it happen.
The earlier hours allow 595 to attract football fans looking for somewhere to watch morning NFL games. But Nguyen says they also reflect changes in longtime customers’ lives.
“A lot of our regulars, they’ve gotten married, they have kids,” Nguyen told the Food and Loathing podcast during an episode recorded at the bar. “Now they want to have a reason to come in and do something family-friendly during earlier weekend hours.”
The new service also served as a practice run as the team prepares to open a second location in Southern Highlands later this fall.
“It challenged us to kind of go through this exercise of coming up with a menu, rolling it out, execution, steps of service,” Nguyen explains, describing brunch as “a live exercise for the upcoming project.”
As with the regular menu, brunch goes well beyond traditional bar food. Nguyen describes the restaurant’s culinary approach as trying “to piss off two different cultures in one dish,” combining familiar dishes with Asian flavors and ingredients.
The new menu includes Vietnamese steak and eggs served with bread, pork liver pâté, pickled carrots and daikon; loco moco with both hamburger and Spam; chicken and waffles; a breakfast burrito; and chilaquiles that can be topped with various proteins. Most breakfast dishes are priced in the low teens, with the Vietnamese steak and eggs coming in above $20.
Meanwhile, that new location is getting close to opening. Nguyen told the podcast he’s targeting a late October or early November opening—the first time the restaurant has publicly announced an opening window for the project.
The Southern Highlands restaurant will be nearly twice the size of the original. Nguyen says the plan is to begin with something resembling “595 Part Two,” while allowing the larger space to eventually support a more ambitious culinary program.
The new restaurant may also feature a larger selection of nonalcoholic drinks, teas and tonics, inspired in part by Nguyen’s first trip to Vietnam last December. That program remains in development.
For Nguyen, however, the challenge isn’t simply building a larger version of 595. It’s determining whether the culture the team has developed over nearly a decade can make the move south.
“SoHi is just another iteration of that belief,” Nguyen says. “I think we’re just opening up, trying to do the same thing, seeing if we can replicate the culture and the steps of service and the quality and all that.”
You can hear the entire podcast episode recorded at 595 Craft and Kitchen here.
