We’d probably been open less than six months when the hot water stopped flowing one Thursday night. By that time, I’d become pretty familiar with how ineptly the building had been slapped together by the landlord’s crew of day laborers, who had little knowledge of how to correctly do things and even less motivation to do them well. Fortunately, I’d gained a certain amount of knowledge working with subcontractors over the years I spent designing and building kitchens for restaurants and clubs, so I could usually MacGyver something to keep a freezer running for a few days or figure out how to get the furnace to stay lit in the middle of a winter weekend.
Looking at the brand new hot water heater, there was no power and it was clear that the pilot was out, so I opened up the access panel and as soon as I shined my flashlight in there I could see it was pretty fried out. All I could do was to call the landlord, who’d had some guy he knew install it, and by the time he finally returned my call, he just said he’d come by in the morning to take a look at it.
I told him on the phone it wasn’t just a thing that needed adjustment, but something that’d need a new part or worse, but that didn’t matter, he wasn’t going to do anything until he looked at it himself. The next morning came and went without him returning any of my calls, and we were heading into service with no hot water. All I could do was get a couple big pots on the stove to heat water to hand wash everything, which took up half the burners and made it really tough to cook. Friday was no different, and Saturday likewise. Finally, on Sunday, he came in, took a look at it, and told me it was fried out. “What did you do to this thing?” he asked, as if whatever happened was my fault.
We made it through Sunday night, then on Monday he told me that I was responsible for replacing the water heater myself. I didn’t say anything, in case he was right, but I took a good long look at the lease and saw that even though he might be right, I could argue that the equipment had been incorrectly installed so it would’ve then been on him. At any rate, I couldn’t operate without hot water, so I had to call someone to replace it. I called a friend who had a restaurant, he recommended Reliable Hot Water, and they had someone out in a couple hours to take a look at the heater. It had been improperly wired, according to him, and we’d been lucky no fire had started as a result. At that point, all I could do was have them replace the equipment, which I was now leasing because I couldn’t afford to buy it, at which point arguing about who was going to fix it became moot.
This was just one of dozens of similar things we had to deal with because of the shoddy way the build out had been done. Water leaked in from all over the place; concerning because there were wires all over the place, there were always puddles on the basement floor, and the walls grew mold like they were made of blue cheese.
The tiny walk-in cooler and freezer in the basement were constructed of plywood covered with whiteboard, but the whiteboard was constantly coming unglued from the plywood because of the leaking so it’d fall down on our produce and meat. I’d put screws in it, but eventually the plywood boards would start coming apart and the leaking never stopped. Snow would blow down the hood fan and also in the kitchen door so bad there’d be a two or three inch pile some mornings when we’d open up. The heat for the kitchen didn’t work most of the time because the unit was installed on the roof in such a way so that the wind would blow the pilot out. We’d have to wear jackets in the kitchen when it got really cold out.
Because they’d installed the quarry tile floor directly on plywood with no sub flooring, the tiles would crack and come loose. We were always trying to glue them back in place but eventually it got to be too much to keep up with. One day, a delivery man was taking a load of produce down the steps and they collapsed, causing him and all the produce to tumble down into the basement. Thankfully, he wasn’t hurt and was able to go back up the other stairs and get out. It took a couple weeks for the landlord to get around to repairing the stairs, so every time someone had to go to the basement, they had to walk back and forth through the dining room.
There was a very small employee bathroom in the basement, located next to the walk-in cooler. When he installed the compressors for the cooler and freezer in a three foot crawlspace behind them with no ventilation, I warned him that they would burn out from overheating. They worked until the weather got warmer, then started to fail. His solution was to cut a hole in the employee bathroom wall, facing the toilet. and put a fan on the compressors. You can imagine how delighted the employees were with that big hole in the bathroom wall.
He would use his key to come and go as he pleased, which was, of course, prohibited unless he’d been given permission or if it were an emergency. He’d bring business acquaintances in and show them “his” restaurant or even have meetings in our leased space when we were closed. We had all of it on security camera, and there were also numerous times he’d set the alarm off when he entered in the middle of the night for who knows what reason, resulting in a wake up call from the alarm company.
He was constantly being sued by people he owed money to or had done work for, and sometimes nuisance-sued them back, so I’d get called to go downtown to appear in court every once in a while to testify about something. As time went on, I learned to minimize my frustration and the impact on our business by just getting things fixed and replaced myself, instead of arguing and waiting then fixing them myself. Thanks to him and the triple net lease, I learned some valuable business lessons. I’d been told that he was a despicable person by the neighbors and even the alderman before we even opened, but I’d already signed the lease (on the recommendation of my attorney), so I couldn’t really do much about it. All I could do was to try to appeal to his slightly more reasonable capital partner, who was at least somewhat interested in continuing our arrangement beyond the three year initial lease. In the end, though, the landlord knew he had us over a barrel and took every opportunity to rub my face in it.
On the bright side, every time I fixed something, I knew I probably wouldn’t have to fix it again, so by the end of the first couple years we had a relatively functional restaurant. Around that time, he started moving all sorts of construction equipment in next to our back door, eliminating all of our customer parking. Building materials were being stacked along the side of the building, and he started digging a pit in back of the place. The whole thing looked like hell, and it was nothing but an eyesore. The neighborhood was upset, and they took it to the alderman, who ran it up the chain. Fines weren’t paid, and eventually bench warrants were issued, making it even harder for me to get hold of him to get the heat working.
The landlord had bigger plans for the building. He was going to build on to the rear of it, and have a small retail shop space with a rooftop “jazz club”. The pit was for the basement and foundation. There was an elevator at the back of the building that was supposed to take customers up to the second and third floors. He’d built the outside shaft (seen in the picture below at far right) and had the elevator installed, and ran it up to the third floor, leaving it up there so no one could mess with it. For some reason and to no one’s surprise, his guys had constructed the shaft crooked, so the elevator didn’t work right and he couldn’t get a permit to run it. I was told that it was going to have to come down and be rebuilt, but I don’t know if that was true or not. What I do know is that one night, when Rachael was closing up, she heard and felt a huge crash from the back of the building, and opened the kitchen door to see that the elevator car had crashed down from the third floor. There was hydraulic fluid all over the place, and it was a real mess. As far as I know, the landlord just manually closed the elevator doors and that was it. We smelled the hydraulic fluid for some time, and it remained a big mess until we got tired of it and cleaned it up ourselves. The outside pit gradually filled with water, and everything came to a standstill for several months.
I tried to work with his partner, but his partner was less strong-willed than he was, so I never really got anywhere. As much as we loved being in Bay View, I started looking around for somewhere else to move to because I just couldn’t see myself or Angela being able to endure working in those circumstances for much longer, and I couldn’t afford the extra $10K a year it was costing me to fix his work.
Angela looks longingly back on this time, forgetting how difficult it was to deal with. She remembers the good times more than I do and I love that about her. We really felt like we’d been embraced by the neighborhood and we loved the friends we’d been making. We were putting out nice, simple bistro fare at a fair price, and we’d brought a lot of new wines into the picture. The critics were on board and we were getting lots of good press and reviews, and generally felt on top of our game. We opened the wine shop upstairs and even extended our lease a couple more years because things had stabilized a little and we didn’t know at the time that there was going to be more construction on the building. As we looked around Bay View, the only buildings that were shown to us were the White House and Crabby’s Supper Club. The White House was an iconic bar that had parking, but even an untrained eye like mine could tell it would’ve needed a half million dollar kitchen buildout and major HVAC work to make the second floor livable, in addition to the $800K they were asking for the building and property. No way I had access to that kind of money. Crabby’s was basically the same. The front of the house was Liberace circa 1965, very well preserved, and in its own Bay View way, kind of cool (though definitely not French), but the kitchen was a collection of well-used home stoves and refrigerators, in no way even approaching anything close to code, and would need everything from a hood fan to NSF rated cooking and refrigeration equipment to fire suppression to a dishwasher; there wasn’t any way that seemed feasible and the owner also wanted around $800K for the property.
We resolved to stick it out until we found something better than what we had that we could also afford. We were paying the landlords around $4500.00 a month and they wanted more. We felt we could do better, so we just kept looking around, believing something was out there for us. I was starting to realize downtown might be on the verge of a revitalization cycle, that a restaurant boom would be part of it, and I happened to know a couple guys who owned a boutique hotel…