The restaurant aims to provide American “heritage” style cooking, featuring an array of classic dishes and sandwiches, including shrimp and catfish po’ boys to hamburgers.
The location also showcases a small market, including locally sourced meat products, fresh vegetables, hot sauces and honey. The restaurant side of things also tries to source some ingredients locally or regionally as well.
Charlo’s occupies street level space attached to the city owned parking garage on Fountain Avenue. The owner of the restaurant is Chad Druckenbroad, who also owns the E.A.T. food truck. He has operated that for about eight years.
Druckenbroad said that he joined the food industry because of his love for cooking and that eventually lead to the idea to open a restaurant. He decided to open Charlo’s in Springfield, due in part to the revitalization efforts that have been taking place in the downtown.
He said that the restaurant has received a warm welcome so far, with customers praising the food, the market portion of the business and the design, which aims to pay homage to Springfield’s industrial past.
The restaurant started with limited hours, serving lunch from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. The goal now is to start expanding those hours starting on Thursday. Charlo’s hours moving forward will be 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., Monday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday.
The idea is to add more items to the market side of things and eventually expand the menu through daily offerings as well as changing certain menu items depending on the season.
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