COVID casualty: One of Lexington’s hottest restaurants in a popular dining spot is gone
One of Lexington’s most recognized restaurants has closed for good due to the difficulties of operating during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Middle Fork Kitchen Bar, on the popular Pepper Campus in the Distillery District, will not be reopening, owner and chef Mark Jensen told supporters in an email Monday night.
“A little shy of six years ago middle fork kitchen bar opened in a beat up corner of Lexington, in a forgotten flood zone, in a dirt parking lot,” Jensen wrote. “It was not a very auspicious opening, but we had a plan. To bring you food & spirits from others that embraced our shared values of sound stewardship & craftsmanship. We wanted to create a restaurant where its inner beauty would shine. To make a place I, & my team, & the town, would be proud of. To honor our farmers, their crops, & their charges.”
“With the onset of the global pandemic, it became very clear that the business, as we once knew it, was going to be hard pressed to survive the realities we all are facing,” he said. “I promised myself when mfkb opened, that if it ever reached the point where it was all about profit & loss, I would shut it down & walk away. So as the pandemic changed the restaurant landscape and made it primarily about the bottom line, this is my cue to stop. It’s time to put middle fork to bed & move forward.”
Jensen could not be reached immediately for comment.
He opened the restaurant in 2015 in part of the refurbished former James Pepper Distillery on Manchester, helping to kick off a revival of what became one of Lexington’s hottest dining and drinking districts.
Jensen built a following with his food truck, Fork in the Road, and financed the new venture with a Kickstarter campaign. He built much of the interior himself and crafted a menu that focused on locally sourced vegetables and meats, cooked in an open kitchen on a wood-fired grill. Jensen could often be spotted picking up fresh seasonal produce at the nearby Lexington Farmers’ Market.
The restaurant wasn’t large but had a big outdoor patio that stretched to the bank of Town Branch and drew a crowd on warm evenings to gather at Ethereal Brewery next door, grab a bite at Middle Fork, and then stroll over to Crank & Boom for ice cream.
The eclectic and inventive food quickly built a following in Lexington and among a larger audience. In 2016, Open Table named it one of the “100 Hottest Restaurants in America,” and there were mentions in Garden & Gun, Conde Nast Traveler, Southern Living, Wine Enthusiast and even Architectural Digest.
In 2018, a Travel piece in the New York Times on Lexington that Middle Fork was known for “housemade sausages, daily-special cuts of lamb and mash-ups like low country okonomiyaki (Japanese savory pancakes).”
But the pandemic hit Middle Fork and other restaurants that focused on dining in rather than carry out very hard. In December, Jensen closed the restaurant for the winter and launched a monthly subscription service and wine club, with plans to come back in the spring.
Jensen said in his email that the time had come instead to close.
“Holding on to hope for some sort of resurrection post pandemic has been so tempting because that is what we do…we keep going no matter what, until it is impossible to do so, often far too long after it is wise to do so. But I’m aware enough to see the writing on the wall,” he said.
While he said he plans to focus on other ventures, he left the door open to a return to the kitchen.
“When the culinary muse calls again, look for more from me and my partner table22. Maybe simply consider this a pause, we’ll hit play again soon,” Jensen said. “For now, we’ll be canceling and refunding any orders that have been placed in March thus far, as well as pausing active subscriptions until we attempt to roll out our new program in the months to come.”
This story was originally published March 23, 2021 at 6:20 PM.
