Anchorage's Brown Bag Sandwich Co. moves to the old Woodshed bar

Anchorage's Brown Bag Sandwich Company has moved to new downtown digs.

The "sandwich pub" moved to the building that previously housed the Woodshed Bar on Third Avenue last week and has big plans for the 7,000-square-foot space.

The upstairs will be a more family-friendly sandwich shop with the same menu of soups, sandwiches and juices as the old D Street location. But downstairs, owner Antoine McLeod and his wife, Brynn, have opened The Bar at Brown Bag, a full-service, late-night bar. The bar currently serves the same sandwich menu but McLeod hopes one day to have a more distinct bar menu.

The couple had planned to move their other restaurant, Killjoy, into the downstairs location. But Antoine McLeod said the downstairs space doesn't fit the modern aesthetic of Killjoy. He said that operation would close at the end of January as they focus on the new location.

"It's bittersweet," he said.

McLeod, 31, said it was hard to leave the D Street location, where the sandwich shop first opened in May 2012. He said the location, in the heart of downtown, was great for foot traffic but the 3,000-square-foot space was too small for the business. As the sandwich shop grew in popularity, he said, lunchtime became a "bottleneck" as a result of the lack of kitchen space.

That should change with the new location, which has a full kitchen and plenty of refrigerator space. The new location includes a separate pick-up window so customers don't have to wait in line to pick up their orders.

McLeod said that when they moved in, things in the old bar were "pretty rough." Old TVs still lined the walls, soda lines had been left full and 2-year-old kegs were still on tap.

"It was in bad shape," he said.

The McLeods have moved over the rustic wooden tables and chalkboard signs they had in the old location and updated the inside of the new building, ripping out the low ceilings and adding white paneling along the sides.

They've updated the downstairs too, ripping out the carpet that lined the bar and adding modern touches like a comic-book-inspired mural and track lighting.

Mike "Jinx" Jenkins used to work at the Woodshed and now works as a slicer and sauce maker for Brown Bag. He said he was pleased with how the location evolved under new ownership.

"Originally, when I worked here, I wanted it transformed," he said. "Even the customers wanted it transformed."

It's been a challenge for the new owners, who began remodeling the location in May. They'd hoped to have it done by November but other plans got in the way -- namely, the birth of their second son, Camden. He was born Dec. 8, joining his 15-month-old brother Asher. The new sandwich shop opened Dec. 14 and the bar portion on Dec. 18.

But the two admit they never expected that three years after opening the original location, it would have grown like it has. When the two opened the original site, McLeod said, all they wanted was a place they would want to go to. Then college students, they wanted a place where they could grab a sandwich, have a beer and maybe get some work done.

Brynn, 29, said that along the way they found the restaurant appealed to more than just people like them, with everyone from businessmen to the late night crowd coming in for sandwiches. She said she embraced it all.

"A lot of it is an evolutionary process," Brynn McLeod said. "You don't know what it will be like until you're in the middle of it."

The two have big plans for the building. A patio and deck area should be open by summer. They hope to even have pub-run-style events given their close proximity to the Coastal Trail.

But be sure to have a little patience, she added.

"A lot of people are curious about what to this building," she said. "But it's still very much a rough draft."