Oregon District restaurant closes ‘indefinitely’
Corner Kitchen, the popular Oregon District restaurant that opened in July 2015 under the direction of the husband-and-wife team of Jack and Natalie Skilliter, is shutting down indefinitely, its owners wrote on Corner Kitchen’s Facebook page Monday afternoon.
“It is with a profoundly heavy heart that we write this, but we cannot ignore the situation in which we find ourselves. We are officially closing Corner Kitchen indefinitely,” the Skilliters wrote.
The restaurant at 613 E. Fifth St. at Wayne Avenue had reopened on June 19 with a new business and service model and a significantly revamped menu. Customers were asked to order their meals at a counter rather than at their table, and reservations were no longer available. The restaurant’s slogan changed from “A finer diner” to “A faster finer diner.”
“A restaurant operates with a tacit public trust that the top priority is the health and well-being of the guests that they serve and the staff that they employ, and that has always been paramount for us,” the owners wrote. “Neither our new model nor our previous model can survive in this current climate with our expense load and reduction in volume. We simply cannot find a financial model in any iteration of the dozens of scenarios that we have explored without either operating in an unsafe environment or incurring insurmountable debt.”
Jack Skilliter is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and Ohio State
University. He previously served as executive chef at what was then the Dayton Racquet Club. He also previously worked at Le Petit Bistro in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and served as sous chef at RIS, a restaurant co-located with a Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Natalie Skilliter served as floor manager and director of catering for Terrapin Restaurant & Catering in Rhinebeck,
N.Y., and as general manager of RIS restaurant in Washington, D.C.
The Skilliters said they will “cherish all of the memories that our community shared with us. We are sorry that we couldn’t do more, and we are utterly heartbroken, we will miss all of you – we will miss the joy that you brought to our lives. Thank you for helping make our dream come true.”