Jeff Ruby Culinary Entertainment has moved into a larger headquarters at 3505 Columbia Parkway in Cincinnati’s Columbia Tusculum neighborhood — across from The Precinct, the brand’s oldest restaurant — and plans to renovate the office so it looks and feels like one of its restaurants, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.
The new office covers 15,000 square feet, is larger than the company’s previous headquarters, and will house up to 50 employees, according to the Enquirer. A full-scale renovation over the coming months will reshape it in the image of the Ruby restaurant experience.
The plans include a “front-of-house” restaurant-style gathering space and seating area, a back office finished in a neutral palette with wood accents and natural light, a training center for new hires, a specially designed office for founder Jeff Ruby filled with career memorabilia, and a walk-in cigar humidor, the Enquirer reported. CEO Britney Ruby Miller described the interior to the Enquirer as refined, rich in colors like ivory and red, with an Art Deco flair — in the style of the brand’s restaurants, but not as bold, eclectic and colorful as some of them.
“It’s not going to be a (Procter & Gamble) office,” Ruby Miller told the Cincinnati Enquirer. “We’re always keeping the guest at the forefront of everything we do, so this space will be good for recruiting new talent, attracting developers and designers and giving them a sense of who we are every day.”
“Every square inch of our restaurants is very intentional. Almost everything Jeff Ruby picked out,” Ruby Miller told the Enquirer. Of her father’s reaction to the new headquarters design, she told the Enquirer: “My dad almost fell over when he saw the renderings, and he was speechless.”
The Columbia Parkway move closes a chapter that began last fall, when the company broke its Downtown lease early, citing heightened safety concerns following a rash of Downtown crimes, the Enquirer reported. Earlier this year, Jeff Ruby Culinary Entertainment and its former landlord, Towne Properties, mutually dismissed dueling lawsuits over the early exit from the longtime lease at 700 Walnut Street, according to the Enquirer; Ruby had alleged Towne failed to provide adequate security after incidents on or near the site, the lawsuits also involved the Lempicka entertainment space, and documents filed in the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas say the issues cannot be refiled.
What happens next: the renovation proceeds over the coming months while the company’s roughly 50 headquarters employees work from the Columbia Parkway space, putting the corporate home of one of Cincinnati’s best-known restaurant brands on the east side, beside the restaurant where the brand began.