#1: We should probably get to know each other.

Hi. I’m Gilli, one of the owners of Brown Bag.

Something we’ve learned from doing this is that if we want to be a neighborhood sandwich shop, we should probably actually know our neighborhood. And you should probably know us too.

When I had my first restaurant concept in 2022, I made a burner Instagram account where I documented what it was actually like trying to build a restaurant - the good, the bad, and a lot of the weird stuff in between.

I loved having somewhere to share the journey. And lately I’ve wanted to do that again, except this time with the people who actually matter most to it: you guys. So once a month, we are going to write a note about what’s actually going on at Brown Bag. What we’re working on, what we’re excited about, what we’re figuring out, and probably some things that have nothing to do with sandwiches.

For the first one, I figured we should probably explain how we got here.

I graduated college during Covid in 2020, which was a pretty bleak time to be figuring out what you wanted to do with your life.

A couple years earlier, I had spent six months studying in Spain and became obsessed with the food culture there. Specifically, charcuterie.

As silly as it sounds, what I really loved was everything that happened around charcuterie. Sitting around a table, sharing food, lingering, talking. It felt less like a meal and more like an excuse to bring people together.

I came home wanting to recreate some version of that. Then Covid happened.

That summer, instead of starting the post-college life I had imagined, I pitched an idea for a made-to-order charcuterie concept through my college’s accelerator program and spent the summer trying to figure out if there were legs.

That idea became Kured. I eventually opened the first shop in Boston. And in 2022, I decided to bring it to New York.

I learned very quickly that operating a restaurant in NYC is a completely different animal. Ultimately, it failed. I got a lot of really good advice from close mentors of mine in the food space.

At that point, I basically had two options: go back to Boston and focus on running Kured as a little mom-and-pop shop, or figure out what to do with this piece of real-estate in the heart of Greenwich Village that we spent months building out. I chose door #2.

Around that time, one of my advisors introduced me to my now business-partner, Tony.

Tony had spent years cooking in fine dining, including working his way up to Executive Sous Chef at Eleven Madison Park.

At the end of those nights, he’d stop at his neighborhood bodega for a sandwich. They knew him by name. They knew his order. It became this little ritual at the end of a very long day.

He loved what the neighborhood deli represents in New York - the familiarity of it, the people behind the counter knowing you, and the fact that pretty much everyone has their deli and their sandwich.

That’s really where the idea for Brown Bag started.

Tony’s thought was: what if we took that feeling and combined it with some of the things he’d learned as an amazing chef?

Keep the menu really tight - 8 sandwiches instead of trying to make everything for everyone - and obsess over making those 8 as good as we possibly could.

House-made meats and sauces. Really good bread. And everything chopped together so you get a little bit of everything in every bite.

It made sense to me immediately. So we partnered up and reconcepted the Greenwich Village space into what is now the flagship Brown Bag Sandwich Co.

Today, we have that little shop on Thompson Street and a second location in Flatiron.

There have been a lot of sandwiches between then and now. A lot of mistakes too. And we’re still figuring plenty of it out.

But really, the thing we’re trying to build today isn’t all that different from what Tony loved about that bodega in the first place: a neighborhood sandwich shop where the food is really good, but where eventually, hopefully, we know your name and your order too.

And that’s kind of the point of these notes.

If you’re the people walking through our doors, ordering lunch for your offices, telling your friends about us, and allowing us to keep building this thing, we want to bring you along for more of the journey - not just show up in your inbox when we want you to buy something.

So consider this Note #1. More next month.

– Brown Bag Team

P.S. If there’s something you want to know about Brown Bag, something you think we should do better, or something you just want to tell us - send it my way - gilli@brownbagny.com. I actually read them.