Adams Morgan Restaurant Tail Up Goat is among a dozen nationally acclaimed restaurants that have launched a high-end home-meal membership called Moveable Feast, delivering mostly-prepared multicourse fine dining meals to subscribers once a month.
Moveable Feast, which launched in April, curates meals from each participating restaurant each month. The September box features a meal from Tail Up Goat. (See the September box menu below.)
While akin to other home meal-kit subscriptions, like Hello Fresh or Blue Apron, Moveable Feast meals are much more upscale — and more expensive.
The boxes can be purchased a la carte. Prices start at $385 for a meal that serves four, up to $1,155 for a meal that serves 12. Moveable Feast also offers seasonal and “all in” memberships, which include monthly deliveries with a modest discount, as well as other perks, including exclusive tastings and invitations to Moveable Feast Chefs’ Tour events. Those range from $1,400 to $3,960.
The meal kits come pre-portioned and largely prepared, requiring about 30 minutes of finishing. Each meal comes with detailed instructions, both printed and with a video demonstration, color-coded ingredients and even plating instructions so the meal looks like the chef envisioned it.
Tail Up Goat owner and chef Jon Sybert and John Stubbs, owner of Jewel of the South in New Orleans, hatched the idea for Moveable Feast during the pandemic as a way for top independent restaurants across the country to show off their chef’s culinary talents to home diners nationwide.
Sybert, a James Beard Mid-Atlantic Finalist, opened the Michelin-starred Mediterranean restaurant with wife Jill Tyler and business partner Bill Jensen, all longtime Adams Morgan residents, in 2016. The name Tail Up Goat is a reference to a saying in the U.S. Virgin Islands used by locals to differentiate between goats and sheep (“tail up, goat; tail down, sheep”).
The Virgin Islands were Tyler’s childhood home. She and Sybert were married on a beach there. Tail Up Goat’s menu includes Caribbean-inspired drinks.
When Moveable Feast launched in April, featuring James Beard Foundation winner Nina Compton and her restaurant Compere Lapin in New Orleans, it shipped 150 boxes. It expects to ship between 400 and 500 boxes for the Tail Up Goat feature in September. It is aiming for 1,000 boxes shipped a month by the end of this year.
Moveable Feast says its hourly employees are paid 30% above local industry average, receive fully-paid health insurance, access to a 401(k) retirement savings account and employee ownership stock options.
Future Moveable Feast boxes include Stubbs’ Jewel of the South in October, Chef Kim Alter’s San Francisco restaurant Nightbird in November, and Chef Jeremy Fox’s Birdie G’s restaurant in Santa Monica.
