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After closing Good Thyme in January, owners Jason Ellis, Conn O’Leary, and Corey Ripley extended hours at Cob & Pen, another one of their restaurants. They added lunch service and have incorporated Good Thyme menu staples.
The local restaurateurs had hoped to expand Good Thyme after opening in 2019. “When we saw how much it took off, the plan was to do something bigger, and it just never materialized,” O’Leary said.
Good Thyme’s small building, located in a parking lot behind the Dixieland Mall at South Florida Avenue and Hunter Street, only offered outdoor seating and had no room to grow.
“We love the brand. We love the staff. We love what’s going on,” Ellis said. They didn’t want to let the concept go. They looked at other locations, but nothing was quite right. And then it hit them — “We have a space that has air conditioning and seating in that same neighborhood,” Ellis said.
“It had nothing to do with product or personnel,” O’Leary said. “It was purely economics and, honestly, the building, but we knew that going in.”
Back to beginnings
When it opened in November 2016, Cob & Pen offered weekday lunch, but eventually they cut back their hours to fit demand. Now, with more restaurants in the area, growth in surrounding neighborhoods, and a built-in audience from Good Thyme, the owners hope they can sustain lunch service for the long term.
Their established team at Good Thyme was at the forefront as they considered the future of the concept.
“The flavors that the chefs were doing at Good Thyme were so good, the quality of service, the staff … that’s hard to come by,” Ellis said. “We really wanted to keep that.” The majority of employees have transferred to Cob & Pen.
Chef Kaelani Leone will now work in partnership with Blake Jones, chef at Cob & Pen, to continue to offer unique specials. The lunch menu includes Good Thyme’s chicken sandwich, Greek and Cob salads, dip trio with salsa, guacamole, and beer cheese, and other popular menu items.
“The plan in the next couple of months will be to work on our Saturday–Sunday brunch menu here to kind of really lean into breakfast over there — breakfast burritos, biscuit sandwiches, biscuit Benedicts — figuring out how to make that work here, and just really revitalizing and reshaping our brunch menu,” Ellis said.
They also hope that the unique atmosphere of Cob & Pen in the Tudor House will appeal to a lunch crowd.
“Now you have an opportunity to come here and check it out and have pretty much everything on the menu, like food, really cool beer, cocktails,” O’Leary said. Ellis said they also have Wi-Fi and space for people to work. He hopes Cob & Pen will appeal to people who need to grab a quick lunch and those who want a space where they can stay a while to get some work done.
Looking ahead
Overall, Ellis and O’Leary said that since being in business, they’ve learned to be flexible and respond to customers and demand. “It’s a living thing,” O’Leary said. “So we’re gonna start out with what we have now, and if the feedback is somewhat different, we’ll try and compromise, meet them in the middle.”
The road diet has slowed down car traffic, O’Leary said, and foot traffic has increased since Cob & Pen opened in November 2016. “As we’ve compromised, changed, and navigated this, I do think lunch now is in a much better spot than when we opened,” he said. He sees the area as an alternative to popular spots like downtown Lakeland and Lakeside Village.
“In the last 5 or 10 years, there’ve been really cool places opening up here,” he said. “And I do think as Polk County grows, population wise, that population wants a place to go, and they don’t want to drive an hour and a half on I-4 to get there. So if they can have it here, that’s, to me, the impetus to have some really cool and innovative ideas flowing through.”
O’Leary, Ripley, and Ellis also own Rec Room in downtown, Maritime in Winter Haven, and Clarke’s Collective, a bar in Athens, Ga.
Owners of the former Good Thyme building said they have not secured a new tenant for the space.
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