Home cooking-style restaurant to open in Columbia Mall - Grand Forks Herald

Home cooking-style restaurant to open in Columbia Mall - Grand Forks Herald

The restaurant will be called What’s Cooking? and will offer a rotating variety of Midwestern home-style dishes. Located in the food court at Columbia Mall, it will fill a void for shoppers and mall employees left open since Subway, one of the last restaurants there, closed in 2018.

“This is my first restaurant,” said owner Matt Clark. “I've definitely always been big, big into food, but, yeah, I'm excited.”

Clark, a Louisiana native, is an Air Force veteran who was stationed at Grand Forks Air Force Base. Once his term of enlistment was up, he found he didn’t want to leave.

“My kids ended up really liking it out here; I really like it out here,” Clark said. “I met a lot of people out here that have helped me along the way and going back to Louisiana; it just wasn’t something I wanted to do.”

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Customers will order at the counter at What’s Cooking? and get what Clark calls “a heavy plate of food.”

The dishes will range from homemade chili, meatloaf and spaghetti to pork chops and more.

“Every day there will be something different,” Clark said, adding he will keep a stable kids’ menu with items such as chicken tenders and macaroni and cheese.

The recipes are all Clark’s, which he has collected over the years.

“Whenever you come up, you'll be able to pick between two or three different proteins, and then two or three different sides and it will always be served with the roll and your drink,” Clark said.

To promote his new business, Clark is selling patron tumblers, with the restaurants logo across the front. Buying a tumbler gets a customer a year-long discount of 15%, and free refills of coffee, tea and soft drinks.

The restaurant is lacking decorations at the moment, which Clark is aiming to fill with art, created by local artists. In pursuit of that goal, he connected with Ra’Chel Alexander, executive director of the Public Arts Commission, a local nonprofit group.

“There's panels at the top of it,” said Alexander about the restaurant space. “They're about 4-foot-by-5-foot panels, and ideally, we would find an artist for each one of those panels so that it's a variety of artwork, variety of styles, all with a Grand Forks theme, but not necessarily.”

Alexander said she is looking into community project grants from the North Dakota Council on the Arts to cover the expenses.

Clark said he likes the idea of keeping a panel or two blank, to create a rotating showcase of artwork.

“That way we can have a featured artist of the month,” he said.

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2020-02-07 16:00:00Z
https://www.grandforksherald.com/business/4924760-Home-cooking-style-restaurant-to-open-in-Columbia-Mall
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