How To Open A Restaurant
Some assembly required. Silverware not included.
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MARCH 15: Kasey walks in and dumps an armload of upholstery books, wood samples, and pieces of fabric on the conference table. You can tell before she arranges them that these combinations are way cool. The geometric patterns are retro but not stodgy. The colors—apple green, espresso, taupe, and, yes, a reddish orange—pop. Lisa breathes in sharply and says, “Yeah!” Emmett’s a little dubious. “If you’re sure about those patterns working together,” he says, winking at Lisa, “I better be.” Next, Kasey opens a catalog and turns to a picture of a wild light fixture made out of Campari bottles. Everybody loves it. The price is a lot—$445. But, what the hell, they pencil two of them into the decor budget.
MARCH 18: You know when you get news so terrible that you can’t even react, you just stare? Beth’s bid is on the table, and they’re all looking at the figures in utter disbelief. The total is a staggering $130,000 over budget. Most of it isn’t even for the glamour stuff; it’s for plumbing, air conditioning, and electrical work. For once, Dick’s office is a glum place. Over the next hour the group fine-tooth-combs the budget, paring off a few thousand dollars here and there but nothing major. The more they talk, the more it seems as if the only hope is for the cavalry—i.e., Jim—to come riding in and save the day. “Can some of the stove hood be split off to his column?” Lisa wonders. “What about the patio things, like heaters and gas lines?” somebody else says. It’s a lot to expect, and they know it. Finally there is nothing else to do but wait till Beth can revise the specifications and get new bids, rejigger the columns, and hope that Jim is in a generous mood.
MARCH 20: In the meantime, it’s time for something fun: the menu. We’re out at the Foxes’ airy “Texan-Tuscan” house tonight for one of several recipe-testing sessions. Emmett and Lisa are cooking, and so is Tristan White, the Asti day chef who’s moving over to head up Fino’s kitchen. Quiet, with a sly little smile and a stupendous tattoo of a samurai and a fish on one arm, Tristan graduated from culinary school in his native Australia. Also here are Brian, Fino’s manager, and Boris Krouse, the courtly, wry wine steward from Asti, who will play the same role at Fino. To say that Boris is interested in wine is like saying that cats are mildly aroused by catnip.
Tristan is doing French onion soup. Emmett is roasting a Moroccan-spiced shoulder of lamb and making a version of some potatoes with garlic aioli that he and Lisa once had in Barcelona. “They were fantastic,” he tells me. Also planned are a seafood paella and a Spanish crema catalana, a flanlike dessert. I get underfoot and annoy them with questions, like, Where do you get ideas for a brand-new menu? Turns out that the process is eminently simple: They read cookbooks, dozens of them. “We all look at them whenever we have a spare minute,” says Emmett. And they travel. They’ve gone to a couple of Mediterranean-style restaurants in Houston (Ibiza and Rioja) and nearly a score of all types in San Francisco. Their visit to the California city also gave them the idea of doing one of the first community tables in Austin, which will be a great focal point for the dining room.
But tonight, they’re seeing if the dishes that sound so good actually taste good. An hour passes, and gradually the house fills with fantastic smells. Another hour crawls by, and just when several of us are preparing to storm the kitchen with pitchforks, the food is ready. We eat, and then they spend half an hour in a roundtable discussion systematically picking apart each and every dish. And I thought restaurant critics were mean.
MARCH 21: Ah, another change of scenery. Emmett, Lisa, and Brian are at the local office of the international design firm Pentagram, sitting around its groovy conference table, while graphic designer Lowell Williams tosses out trial menu covers like cards from a deck. With his round black glasses, à la the late architect Philip Johnson, Lowell cuts quite the eccentric figure. The first of his three samples has stripes, a bit like the Italian flag; the second shows a picture of a cork with “FINO” printed on it. The third takes each letter of “Fino” and enlarges it to fill an entire page, so that some menu covers have a single large F, others a large I, and so on. It’s a hip, clean look. Lisa approves. As for signs, Lowell wants to stencil “FINO Restaurant Patio Bar” directly on the wall of the building, like a stock-market ticker. “We can make it great big, like a frieze,” he says. “It will also cost thousands of dollars less.” Lisa says, “Thousands less? I love it.”
MARCH 22: The tension is as thick as the foam on one of Dick’s cappuccinos. Jim is here to look at the budget. Everyone is sitting at the conference table with tight little smiles on their faces. When Jim asks, “Have you all seen the costs?” Brian jokes, “Yeah, Emmett didn’t have any gray in his hair a week ago.” Michael begins the meeting by explaining the overall design; then Kasey describes the decor. They’re all watching Jim like cats at a mouse hole. He smiles and says, “Neat.” Then Beth takes a breath and says, “I always get the fun part,” and hands around a spreadsheet. The total in the landlord’s column has got to be tens of thousands of dollars more than he expected. Beth finishes her spiel, and at first it seems like things are all right. Jim smiles again and says, “I love the design, and I am really excited about it all.” Then his smile fades. “However,” he goes on, “these numbers far exceed the scope of the agreement and discussions I’ve had with Emmett and Lisa. We are way, way, way, way, way, way apart, and under no scenario am I prepared to put in that amount without contemplating it first.” Dead silence. Then he turns to Emmett and Lisa and says, “The three of us need to sit down and discuss this—alone.” Emmett asks, “Now?” Jim says, “Yes.” They get up and leave. Dick turns to me with a grin: “I think your backstage pass just got revoked.” No kidding.
I don’t get a call from Lisa till late afternoon. Has Jim pulled out? Is this the end? Finally the phone rings. Whew! Good news: He’s still on board and they have another meeting planned. Lisa sounds chastened but philosophical. “You know, we hadn’t wanted to bother him with too much detail along the way,” she says, “but in hindsight, maybe we should have—except we didn’t know ourselves until last Friday.” Bottom line, she and Emmett have crunched some numbers and they think the job is going to cost more like $500,000 than $400,000. And that means two things: slashing the budget and raising more money. “But we’ll figure it out,” she says softly. “We can still have a fantastic restaurant.”
APRIL 11: Major progress. Lisa calls to say that, after several agonizing meetings, they’ve shaved $55,000 off the project. They axed some of the patio shutters and the outdoor heat lamps and, sadly, eliminated the Campari light fixtures. To save more, Michael and Carey have redesigned the wine wall and the entrance. “The design is now as tight as it can be,” Lisa tells me. The other good—actually, fantastic—news is that Jim has agreed to kick in a considerable additional amount for permanent improvements. On top of that, they’ve raised more money—two new investors at $25,000 each—and they’ve gotten a $100,000 line of credit at their bank to use if they need to. In short, they’ve saved the restaurant, but now there’s another $50,000—maybe $150,000—to pay back. The actual date for construction to be done has now been set: JUNE 22. Fino is under the gun to succeed—fast.
APRIL 16: Road trip! Emmett and Tristan and I are in Houston at Joe Presswood’s auction center so they can buy gently used equipment for Fino’s kitchen. The plan all along has been to purchase some pieces new (refrigerators, for instance) and the rest old. Prowling around the huge, fluorescent-lit metal warehouse looking at stuff, we marvel at the endless rows of stoves, refrigerators, bar sinks, proofing ovens, stockpots big enough to cook a hippo, and one strange contraption that looks like R2-D2. The auction takes two days, but by the end, Emmett has a truckload of equipment to take home. More will be bought later.
MAY 10: Construction is under way, and our weekly meetings have moved to the Fino site. A month ago, it looked like something out of Blade Runner, with debris everywhere and a fine gray dust hanging in the air. Now walls are starting to take shape. When I arrive today, though, tape measures are out, a bad sign. Emmett is standing in the open corridor that will run between the kitchen, dining room, and bar, and he’s pretty wound up. “The space is too tight,” he’s saying. “It won’t work if a waiter has a tray of food and somebody else is picking up drinks.” It turns out that the original, eighteen-year-old blueprints—on which the entire remodel is based—are seven inches short in one dimension. In his usual quiet mode, Michael turns to Mark Bridle, the job supervisor, and asks, “Can you move a wall?” Mark smiles weakly.
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