PHOTOGRAPH PROVIDED BY THE RARE
Next month, The Mason Mile will welcome a new restaurant to its downtown district in the form of The Rare, a new American bistro opening in a 150-year-old building on East Main Street.
Although Mason residents Nikki and Josh Logsdon purchased the building back in October 2022, construction didn’t start until mid-January of this year, due to, well, all the things you can imagine need to happen before a building from the1800s can be turned into a modern restaurant.
And, while it would have been less of a headache if they had demoed the building and started over, rehabbing it was always the goal. “We felt very passionate to restore it even though it would have been easier and cheaper to tear it down,” Nikki Logsdon says. “It has quite a presence along the Mason Mile, so we wanted to make sure it stayed here and was revitalized.”
The first step toward constructing the restaurant of the Logsdons’ dreams was to take it down to the studs, doing their best to demo only the things that had been added on over the years or what was required to get it up to code, leaving the original building largely intact.
In some places finding the original structure was like peeling back a very thick, dusty, confusing onion, like when they had to remove six layers of paneling, plaster, and drywall to expose the original brick. In other areas structural integrity was missing altogether, as they discovered when a peek under the floorboards revealed that none of the joists were attached to the brick anymore.
To address this, the original floor was removed, a new concrete slab poured, and a fresh floor installed. Luckily, they were able to repurpose some of the original wood planks as a decorative cover for a new steel support beam.
Overall, Nikki Logsdon is pleased with slow-but-steady results.
“It looks completely different than when we started,” she says. “I feel like it looks closer to what it was in the past. We bent over backward to make it feel beautiful and comfortable and put it back to its original design.”
While the structural endeavor came with varying degrees of difficulty, one area that was smooth sailing was securing former Pepp & Delores executive chef Max Wagner as the new head chef.
It turns out Logsdon and Wagner are distantly related by marriage and grew up going to the same family reunions. When word about the restaurant got to Wagner via another family member, he got in touch with Logsdon and they met to discuss the restaurant.
“She invited [my family] to meet her husband and her kids at The Common Beer Company the next week,” Wagner says. “It was one of those things where the understanding of the vision she had for the restaurant, its role in the community, and the events space really sold me. It felt right, it felt very easy and organic.”
Since Wagner was involved early on, he was able to design the kitchen and help craft the “intentionally comfortable” menu with Logsdon. “We want the food to feel familiar [but] with a little bit of elevation to it, very approachable, but unique,” he says.
Included on the approachable-but-unique menu items includes The Rare Way, a take on a Skyline three-way that features braised short rib and aged cheddar atop a bed of pasta. “It feels very ‘food for the common man,’” he says. “I grew up eating Skyline, [and] it gives that feeling of hominess and comfort, and that’s the inspiration for a lot of the things that we’re going to put on the menu.”
In addition to the Skyline nod, diners will find other familiar items with a Rare twist throughout the menu including pasta, handheld entrees, appetizers, desserts, and more, adjusting with seasonal ingredients as needed.
The Rare is big—7,000 square feet split between both floors with the first floor housing the main dining rooms, bar, and covered patio, and the upstairs event room, which is accessible by stairs or elevator. After the holidays, they also plan to open a carry-out window to service The Common Beer Company next door.
128 E. Main St., Mason, theraremason.com
