Ritual Swaps Tavern for Kitchen & Beer Garden

Michael Flores and Staci Wilkins, owners of North Park's Ritual Tavern, have been steadily making changes and improvement to their 30th Street restaurant, which celebrates its sixth anniversary this summer.

Their latest news is a name change; Ritual Tavern is now Ritual Kitchen & Garden. Flores and Wilkins' reason for the switch is to help better convey their focus, saying they "have always sold more food than beverage, yet our name was not conveying the nature of our food emphasis", and that visitors often interpreted the "tavern" in the name to mean a sports bar or dive bar.

Ritual's chef, Kyle Berman, has been building up the menu since his arrival (get to know him in our Eater Interview), adding weekly vegan specials and incorporating produce grown on their backyard beer garden/patio. He tell us that "our focus on high quality sustainable local fare no longer fits with the greasy bar food that the word tavern implies" and that "Instead of a tavern where the food is an after thought meant mainly to keep patrons washing down more beer, we are a kitchen focused on accenting our fine food with craft beer."
· Ritual Kitchen & Beer Garden [Facebook]
· All Beer Coverage on Eater [~ESD~]