In the 17 months since Mitchel London and Thomas Mikolasko took on the former Baked space at 279 Church, there’s been a fire, a pandemic and a flood — only thing missing is the locusts. But despite it all, they are now open and serving prepared foods to go as phase 1 of a long-term plan to build out a full-service restaurant there — and then some.

Twiggy To Go (the website should be live in a day or two) has a solid selection of mains (brick chicken, Indonesian noodles, honey glazed salmon) and sides (crispy leaf potatoes, roasted squash, braised endive) along with homemade desserts (lemon tea cake, chocolate soufflé, apple tart tatin) all prepared in the kitchen downstairs. Everything is made there and made from scratch; even the brioche rolls for the hamburgers (coming soon) are baked on site. (I will tell you I ate half the crispy potatoes on the way home — you can see the evidence in the photo below.)

The plan for now is to operate this way until the end of the year, with the addition of a sizeable deck from the curb onto the sidewalk come April. Then in January 2022, the false wall in the back will come down to reveal a dining room, the takeout counter will convert to a bar with all the plumbing already in place and their original plan will be, we all hope, back in action.

Given the circumstances, it was not so much of a pivot since London — Ed Koch’s former chef at Gracie — already has a catering business, and takeout was always going to be part of the plan. (London is there himself, cooking six days a week.)

“We just did it in reverse order,” said Mikolasko. And when he puts the finishing touches on the restaurant early next year, he hopes to find a spot in the neighborhood to continue running the To Go part of the business. “I didn’t want to wait around until September, and I didn’t want to build it out for 25 percent capacity, so we decided to start this way. We just wanted to get open.”

There are fun plans in the works, starting with the hire of David Maher, the former bar manager at Balthasar (above). There will be weekend baskets to go for summer, holiday meals and perhaps a burger bar once the deck opens. And while I thought the space looked great, by next week there will also be floral arrangements inside and out, art on the walls and seating around the back counter.

There’s lots of other elements that will evolve over time, even the name of the permanent restaurant. Twiggy came out of a brainstorming session with their branding guy, who asked the team to dig deep for inspiration. After tossing out nearly 140 other options, they all settled on Mikolasko’s mother’s nickname; his catering manager came up with the To Go as a suffix.

The pricing and offerings are also in flux (my order above came to $62 and fed two of us for two full meals). The team will have to see what works, how some dishes are received, what people like — but first they need the people. “We need to find the right balance, and then it has to be about value. People have to think it’s worth it.”

Twiggy To Go
279 Church at White
twiggytogo.com