Archer & Goat

Unveiling Harlem’s budding dining scene

For many New Yorkers, going north of Central Park for dinner is out of the question. In most roundups and features being published at the time, only restaurants like Fieldtrip from Jame Beard award winner J.J. Johnson and Red Rooster from television star chef Marcus Samuelsson would ever be featured, because a majority of the writers were based in Brooklyn (2 hours away from Harlem depending where you’re coming from) and had an outdated perception about the quality and variety of restaurants operating there.

This made our mission to not only garner interest in this unique family-owned passion project, but also to contextualize it within the larger dining scene that the New York media had been largely ignoring. We did this by collaborating with the launch of the first ever Harlem Restaurant Week, which allowed us to present not only Harlem as a vibrant and worthwhile food destination for New Yorkers and tourists alike, but also shine a light on Archer & Goat as one of the premier destinations in this scene despite its infancy and lack of a nationally recognized chef. Results included local broadcast appearances on Fox 5’s “Good Day New York” and ABC7’s “Neighborhood Eats” and attention from national travel publications like AFAR and Travel & Leisure.

Communicating under crisis

Only a month off celebrating their one year anniversary – an extremely challenging feat for any first time restaurant owners – husband-and-wife team Alex Guzman and Jenifar Chowdhury (pictured above with their infant daughter) felt like they had already experienced a lifetime of hurdles. Due to difficult zoning regulations affecting their space on historic Malcolm X Blvd, it had taken the couple 5 years just to open their doors. After a successful inaugural Harlem Restaurant Week and a significant bump in sales thanks to increased media attention, everything seemed to finally be on the up and up. Then everything changed when mandatory closure orders brought the New York dining world to a halt.

For the past six months, restaurants in the city have been doing whatever it takes to survive, and only just been promised that 25% capacity indoor dining is on its way (not nearly enough for most places once it is too cold to seat guests outside). From a business perspective, there was no solution, only survival, so we did everything we could to advise Alex and Jen (pro bono) on how to navigate the challenge circumstances. Once only known to a small die-hard group of locals, Archer & Goat now become the focal piece of national stories from outlets like Buzzfeed News and the Wall Street Journal about adaption and struggles being made by the industry as a whole. For the months when only takeout and delivery were allowed, Alex worked by himself producing batches of their signature cocktails and when outdoor dining was permitted once again, they brought back as much of their staff as they could and found ways to make it work. Today Alex and Jen gearing up for the new indoor dining regulations set to go into place at the end of September with optimistic sights set on the future and hopes that what they’ve built will be able to endure.