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URBANA — After five years on “paws,” a popular local restaurant is back and ready to show that it’s learned some new tricks.
Black Dog Smoke and Ale House’s Urbana location at 201 N. Broadway Ave. will reopen at 7p.m. Thursday, said co-owner Michael Cochran.
Reservations are required, and the same will be true Friday and Saturday. During this time, the restaurant will serve a set menu of about four courses to all customers, instead of taking individual orders.
“Opening a restaurant can be really chaotic, and I’m trying to take as many variables out of it as I can,” Cochran explained. “And so if we just have a set menu and we know how many people are coming, we’ll do that. That’ll give us time to train our staff, give them a chance to find their way around.”
He hopes to have a “real reopening” with a full menu — and no reservations required — sometime next week, possibly on Tuesday.
The date coincides with April Fool’s, the municipal election and Cochran’s wedding anniversary.
“My wife said that that was alright,” he said. “In fact, it was her idea.”
The full reopening date will be posted at blackdogurbana.com. The set menu for the first few days will also be available at the site.
Black Dog Urbana first opened in February 2009; Cochran said it’s hard to believe so much time has passed.
The business’s second location at a former train depot in downtown Champaign opened six years later.
Black Dog Urbana closed in March 2020 amid the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the Champaign location has largely remained open.
Cochran said in a previous interview that the Urbana space did not seem “well suited” to the adjustments that would have been required at the time.
He added that staffing also became a major obstacle, along with “a series of other issues that made reopening too big of a hurdle until recently.”
The staff at Black Dog Urbana was training on Wednesday afternoon. Almost all new faces, Cochran said, aside from three that have been working at the Champaign location.
“The idea was just to keep, leave the Champaign restaurant running as well as possible and change it as little as possible, and then start new here,” Cochran said.
Cochran said their customers can still expect a smokehouse-style menu, though there will be some differences compared to their other location.
“When we started here in Urbana, we were a destination place because we were unique,” he said. “We were doing something nobody else was doing. And we kind of want to make it unique again, even from ourselves, even from the Champaign location. We want to give people a definite reason to come here, find some new favorites.”
The preparations have also included renovations and cleanup, including improvements to the kitchen.
“The outside of the building needed a lot of attention, too, and that’s what alerted everybody to what was going on,” Cochran said.
He noted that people seem to be excited by Black Dog’s return, though that also comes with expectations that the business hopes to live up to.
Still, he looks forward to reopening and being a part of downtown as new businesses continue to crop up.
“(There are) a lot of reasons for people to come to Urbana, and we just hope we’re one of them,” Cochran said.
