NEW HANOVER COUNTY — A restaurant that found its home on downtown’s cobblestone-lined Front Street in 2016 has officially moved to a new part of town.
READ MORE: World flavors of Platypus and Gnome fill popular Front Street restaurant space
ALSO: ‘High-powered meat’: New Platypus and Gnome food truck serves wild game, 100% beef
Platypus and Gnome owner Matt Danylec said the restaurant, located in the Grand View Luxury Apartments at the foot of the Wrightsville Beach drawbridge, got its permits approved around 2:30 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 29. Without second thought, the team opened its doors.
In its first week, a little more than 100 diners have come through via word-of-mouth.
Platypus and Gnome took over the former Artisano location, a pizza and gelato restaurant that closed in August after a year-and-a-half in operation. The 2,6000-square-foot eatery seats more than 80 guests, with indoor and outdoor seating, and is outfitted with a Montague hearth-bake pizza oven. As such, Platypus has launched a new menu that features pies, in addition to its burgers.
In the last seven years, the restaurant garnered a following for featuring items with game meat, such as camel burgers, wild boar soup, and a kangaroo panini. Now, it’s entering the pizza game, with exotic meats becoming toppings and transforming a slice into a new experience.
“We aren’t an Italian restaurant,” Danylec clarified Friday. “So this is a very Platypus and Gnome take on pizza.”
The best seller so far in its infancy has been the Game Changer — a meat lover’s pie, featuring braised elk, duck salami, bison chorizo and wild boar ham. Though the salami is ordered through one of Danylec’s sustainable purveyors, the chorizo is made in-house and the wild boar is brined for several days and slow-smoked onsite.
“The elk shoulder we beer-braise overnight, so it pulls apart nice and tender,” he said.
The meats are topped with mozzarella and housemade marinara, on a crust that’s thin but “not super thin” — more a balanced chew and crunch.
Pizza has always been on Danylec’s radar for the eatery. He confirmed it was part of the restaurant’s original concept.
“But then we found a space downtown and we really liked it,” he said. “But there was no room to get a pizza oven under the hood, let alone through the door. So we just kind of had to abandon that. We’re pretty excited to be able to come back to pizza.”
The menu also includes multiple salads (Mediterranean, Roquefort), appetizers (candied bacon, artichoke hummus) and burgers. The team has become known for building mile-high handhelds in a more unique fashion. A ground elk variety is on the menu, along with the restaurant’s signature ground brisket, short-rib and chuck blend.
“We will expand the list a little bit as we go down the line and possibly offer some other proteins that you could sub in — maybe doing something with a good ground lamb and have chicken options.”
The menu — with prices ranging from $8 to $20 — will evolve as the restaurant continues to fulfill its transition into the new space. While the downtown eatery had a full entree menu and even Sunday brunch, Danylec said Platypus may bring in weekend entree specials, but it’s evolving into a more fast-casual concept. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, sandwiches have been more popular among customers.
“I don’t know if it’s due to recession,” Danylec said. “People want to go out and still want to have an evening with their family or friends and not spend $30 or $40 on an entree anymore, so they get a burger or something they can get in that $15 to $20 range.”
Also new to the restaurant is a gelato freezer. The first shipment of 15 flavors arrived Wednesday. Danylec said the frozen treats will be utilized in fun ways, including as accompaniments for desserts — brownies, bread pudding and cheesecake — and in cocktails. The restaurateur is still awaiting ABC permits to come through, which Danylec expects will be in two weeks.
“We will have boozy shakes and sorbet flavors that we can top with Prosecco and mules made with lime sorbet,” he said.
The move didn’t come without trepidation, as Danylec said Platypus had built a solid following downtown. He learned last spring, as the lease renewal was approaching, the restaurant’s move was imminent. The landlord at 9 S. Front Street wanted to renovate the space and make needed repairs.
“And there was no way for us to continue there and have those things done at the same time,” Danylec said.
He considered another location in the vicinity and scouted a space nine blocks up in the Soda Pop District.
“That would have been a great fit for us,” Danylec said, “but that would have meant a full build-out.”
The Artisano space, formerly Cruz, was already retrofitted and only a few years old.
Though Platypus built a clientele downtown, Wilmington’s growth is reassuring Danylec diners won’t be hard to come by. He said downtown is shifting; unlike when he first opened, crowds traveled there because there wasn’t anywhere else to go. Today, Danylec said he sees many sticking to more neighborhood pockets.
“Now, if you live in Monkey Junction, you stay in Monkey Junction,” he said. “Everything you really need is there. Even if you look across the river into Leland, five and six years ago, there was not a lot there, but now they have breweries, and a good crop of restaurants that have come up over there.”
Whereas downtown benefited from a lot of foot traffic, Platypus and Gnome is located at 7215 Wrightsville Ave., where Eastwood Road intersects. It’s the only entrance onto Wrightsville Beach, and both roads combined see more than 20,000 vehicles in the vicinity daily, according to the North Carolina Department of Transportation traffic volume map. Not to mention, plenty of folks frequently bike by on the way to Harbor Island.
The restaurant also has more than 100 built-in neighbors, as residents live above the bottom-floor, mixed-use complex, also housing a nail salon and dentist. Danylec said he’s already begun to see regular faces.
“We really want to be a great casual hangout spot for everybody, though,” he said, “not just a special-occasion restaurant for date night or anniversaries.”
With the move comes new hours; Platypus and Gnome was closed Tuesdays and during the pandemic on Mondays as well. Now, it’s open seven days a week for lunch and dinner. Saturday and Sunday brunches will be added eventually, while Danylec said the restaurant’s food truck, Chrome Gnome, will park its wheels for a bit and be utilized for private events in the future.
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