City Hall

Howard, Russell and I went to City hall this morning, the upside down pyramid by ASU, to meet with city planning officials. The meeting was arranged in advance by Chris Anaradian - Manager of Development Services and also attending was Lisa Collins (Planning Director) and Michael Williams (Deputy Development Services Director). We all met in a conference room and I gave them an approximate scope of work. We're not tearing the building down so we don't need a complete set of architectural plans, but we need permits for things I didn't realize, like a new water heater, and replacing air conditioners. Most of our interior work is cosmetic when it gets right down to it. Lots of cosmetic, but stuff that doesn't require permits, like floors, paint, upholstery, seating etc. We will need a new ceiling plan and a lighting plan.

Michael is going to go through the city archives to look for plans for the building - for which we have zip. We also discussed the patio - which will need to be reviewed by Lisa's department, and we have to make sure in advance that the parking lot can support the additional seating of a patio. The meeting was super-productive and I think we all have a clear vision of what we're required to do. We aren't close to a design but we know what to do when we have one. All three officials were cordial and helpful and played along with the above staged photo-op where it looks like I'm making a big presentation. The plans I'm pointing to are unrelated to our project and just happened to be laying around. If you zoom onto the picture you'll see the plans say 2 CAR GARAGE.

Later in the afternoon I unlocked the restaurant for Emily and Carina, two budding designers from Kim's office, because they needed to re-measure THE ENTIRE BUILDING to complete their floor plan. It must have been over 100 degrees in there and Emily is extremely pregnant but they spent the hottest hours of the day in there measuring every possible dimension in the building. I wimped out after a while and came back later to let them out. They were all smiles and WAY more enthusiastic than I was. While I was there I checked to see if the water had been turned on as promised by the City…. It wasn't. I tried to call the city but my face was so sweaty that pressing my face against my new Blackberry Storm caused the phone to seize. I hate this phone.

Elevation Time

I met with Dan from Ecolab, our pest control company at 7:00 am this morning and developed a construction schedule to take care of our creepy friends. We are scheduled to have the water turned on tomorrow and can then begin cleaning the place up later this week. I recieved a rendering from Kim Dalton of Dalton Interiors. Just a first draft idea of how the building might look with the front fake log work removed, adding a simple patio, awning etc.... Its a nice start and if you zoom in on the patio you'll see me and JVG hanging out. Makes it even more surreal than it already is! I will try to do a complete video and photo tour before we do anything substantial inside. It really isn't bad. I've been in restaurants that are open for business and are much dirtier than this is. Tommorrow my contractor Howard is going with me to the City of Tempe for our first meeting with the city. This should be interesting....

The big reveal

Today Chrissy and I held a meeting with the Managers and we told them for the first time what was in store for RigaTony's, and ultimately for them. I had expected them to be happy about the move, but they were practically jumping out of their seats with excitement. Laura especially. She kept interrupting me saying "Can we go there? Can we go now?!" Which is what we ended up doing. I took them on a tour of the building giving them an overview of the plan - which is all I actually have right now! Steph was just wowed by the place, especially the patio plan, and Hutson had some bizarre décor ideas which I won't disturb you with. It was hot and muggy and pretty oppressive inside the building but its so exciting we hardly noticed.
We talked about how and when to tell our customers about the move. It’s the scariest part to me because information gets garbled so easily and "RigaTony's is moving" will inevitably get translated into "RigaTony's is closing!" It could be a disaster as we're at least 9 months from the move and I can visualize people not coming for dinner because RigaTony's is closed!!! I have a plan for communicating this clearly that which we discussed at length which, as it happens, includes this blog.
While we were taking pictures of the outside a couple pulled up to have lunch. We told them the restaurant wasn't open and Laura launched into a hard sell for Iguana Mack's which included a discount card.

A new beginning

Fifteen years ago in 1994 I signed a lease on a run down decrepid building on the corner of Knox and Arizona Ave in Chandler. It had been a Golden Corral Restaurant, and then a series of failed Mexican restaurants. Being a New York Italian I had always wanted to open a little neighborhood Italian joint and I had been eyeing the corner for serveral years. It seemed about the right size and it was really close to my other restaurant, Chops. Finally I drove by and saw a white paper posted to the front door which pretty much always pronounced the death of a restaurant, and I quicky called the landlord so I could roll the dice and try to succeed where others had failed. I signed the lease and later that day began a careful inspection. The place was a catastrophy. The windows were painted black and protected by pool fencing. The bar was made of corrugaged steel and chicken wire. The floors were chipped and painted concrete and adorned with cheap plastic furniture. Cockroaches outnumbered whatever customers they had by 10 to 1. The electrical panels were disassembled and taken apart and hazardously wired to run backwards so electric generators could run the lights when the power company shut the place down. My friends and family thought I was crazy, but I had an undeserved and probably very naive confidence in the property and six months later RigaTony's was born. We struggled in the beginning, but ultimately succeeded and prospered beyond any expectation.

I never dreamed back then that the fifteen year lease I signed would slowly slip away with me still being in that building, and doing more business than ever before. Hell, I had just turned 40 and still at the stage where fifteen years seemed like infinity. How fast it all goes by. In the last few years I have seen the last day of the end of our lease inexorably approaching. Choices? I had several. Renew the lease for X many more years? Retire and do nothing? Or move our beloved institution to another location.

None of these choices seemed all that great. Its a long long story but our landlord is a complete and utter nightmare to deal with. If I was a novelist I would employ his character as a world class villian, and only an iron-clad lease has protected us from him for the last decade and a half. I made a couple attempts to negotiate, but I quicky realized that it was pointless. Retire and kill RigaTony's? Well, at 57, I'm still a youngster and some people are just starting to hit thier prime at my age. Besides I love my job and I think I am just now finally getting good at this. Besides if I killed RigaTony's I'd get even more death threats than I did when I killed Chops. So over time I realized that no matter the difficulty, no matter the expense, RigaTony's would have to be moved, and at the start of this year Chrissy and I began the search for the perfect location.

Well, after months of searching I have been reminded that sometimes the answers to tough questions are a lot closer to home that you realize. I had, for quite a while been intrigued by a restaurant building that was less than a mile from my house in south Tempe, where I have lived since 1993. When I moved to the neighborhood the the building was operating as a JB's restaurant, for which it was originally designed. It was then reincarnated as a Timberlodge Steakhouse. That didn't last more than a couple of years and then became a failing Mexican Restaurant. Does anyone besides me see a pattern here? This time I approached the landlord BEFORE the restaurant closed and just today we recieved the keys to our brand new, beat up old restaurant.

The restaurant has been closed up for a couple of months now and as I inspect the inside of the building I breath in the stale greasy frangrence of fried tortillas, inspect the cracked and vandalized windows, and dodge the occasional scurrying cockroach. And yet all I feel the thrill and exhillaration of a challenge. A challenge the likes of which I haven't felt for exactly 15 years.

This time I have committed myself to posting our progress on this project. The difference between now and 15 years ago is that I have thousands of loyal RigaTony's guests to whom I owe both our past success and and a concise communication about where we are going and how we're getting there. I am hoping this blog will give all of you a voice and an actual method of being involved in this project. After all, in a sense it's as much your restaurant as it is mine. I'm also willing to wager that the crazy ride between now and our grand opening will be at least a little entertaining. Thanks for reading - stay tuned!

Mike