The Preservery, a RiNo mainstay, will close its doors for good on Sunday

The Preservery, a new-American restaurant/market/deli that opened at 3040 Blake St. in April 2016, will close its doors on Sunday, Sept. 4.

The restaurant helped set a standard in the River North Art District with its food, which rose above the standard fare in the adjacent Ballpark neighborhood, as well as its warehouse-chic aesthetic and its ability to straddle the difficult line between being trendy and being real.

In a blog post on the restaurant’s website, Whitney Ariss, who owns the Preservery with her husband and business partner, Obe Ariss, said there were two harsh realities behind the decision.

“The first is that as long as we were tenants renting from a landlord, we were always going to be handing over any modest profits toward the cause of making a wealthy person (or company) even wealthier,” she wrote, adding that rent has increased almost 30% in seven years.

“Secondly, as long as we were running a restaurant we were always going to be tethered to it. Our greatest liberation was becoming our own bosses, but we couldn’t really claim that freedom when we had to be physically present for every operational hour of every operational day,” she added.

And finally, she wrote that the pandemic closures and the accompanying difficulties of keeping the restaurant running during that time had a long-lasting effect.

But it was also during the pandemic, in December 2020, that Whitney had an epiphany. Driving through a snowstorm to get to work one morning, she saw “numerous tent encampments around the neighborhood looking both vulnerable and brave, all blanketed in white.”