Two Tulsa breakfast restaurants to diversify the experience, extend hours

TULSA, Okla. — Two Tulsa breakfast restaurants are breaking the mold and opening at night.

Both businesses said it’s important to diversify the experience as people return to eating in restaurants post-COVID.

Bramble in Tulsa’s Pearl District is swapping jelly for salsa. They’re now open at night when the restaurant also changes its name to Hole Mole. They will serve Mexican food at night.

Manager Mandy Lauke told FOX23 the idea came about because some of their staff shared some family recipes, and they want Tulsa to try them too.

“It seems crazy to just completely flip this restaurant. It feels really crazy, but I think it’s going to be a lot of fun,” Lauke said.

She also said it’s important to restaurants to change things up in order to keep the doors open.

“Since we are a breakfast joint, brunch if you will, we were kind of just sitting on empty space after 3p.m.,” Lauke explained. “We were not bringing any money in, but we’re still paying the same amount for our space. So we thought, why not bring in some extra capital? A fun way to get creative without having to find a new place.”

Across downtown, another coffee shop is sharing their space. Foolish Things owner Justin Carpenter told FOX23 when COVID hit, they had to get creative as well.

“That core group of people who [work] at an office down here were working from home, and so we had to cut our hours,” Carpenter said. “We had to be as efficient with the hours as we possibly could be, and that allowed us to have space that we wanted to create value, and our while thing from the beginning is we want to leverage as many hours as possible for this to be a community space.”

So Carpenter brought in a chef collective at night called Et Al. The group is made up of 11 chefs, and they serve different foods on different nights of the week.

Colin Sato is one of the chefs, and he told FOX23 sharing the space at a time of increased inflation and supply chain issues helped them get going.

“On their end, they’re open until 3 [p.m.], but they pay rent 24 hours a day,” Sato explained. “On our end, we were totally new. None of us had owned a business before. So really it was our way of being able to do a business two or three days a week to start out with without being saddled with all these overheads, licensing fees and everything.”

He continued, “It was a way to get our feet wet without taking such an enormous risk.”

Carpenter also said it’s been very successful so far.

“Sales have grown week over week, month over month, the amount of creativity that they’ve poured out has only gotten better since they’ve been here. The idea is we have space, and we want to share it. So we do.”

Et Al has been so successful at Foolish Things that they’ve now expanded to five to six nights a week.

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