When chef Andres Kaifer first visited Customshop for dinner, the Miami native fell in love with it. Unknowingly, that visit was the start of him accomplishing his longtime goal of owning a restaurant.

He’d spent about three years in Raleigh, where he worked as Durham Hotel’s chef de cuisine and Vidrio’s executive chef. Then, Kaifer was offered a position with Mac’s Hospitality Group (a Charlotte-based restaurant group that includes Mac’s Speed Shop, Backstage Lounge, and SouthBound). Because he had a working relationship with the restaurant group’s former president, Shang Skipper, he relocated to Charlotte to serve as the group’s culinary director. Near the two-year mark, he knew it was for him to open a restaurant and the Customshop dining experience was confirmation.

“It was a perfect size for what I had envisioned my restaurant would be concept-wise,” Kaifer says. “To me, everything just made sense. The menu changed often, there was no real set concept of sorts, and you could just kind of do whatever you wanted, which is what I wanted to do. So I decided to purchase it.”

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