The fifth and final installment in a long (looooong) series of posts about how Dirt Candy came to be built. The story that took a year to tell. Thrills! Chills! Evil plumbers! Mentally ill contractors! Shakedown artists! Ransom demands! If you’re thinking of opening a restaurant, then read these entries and avoid my mistakes. Plus, there is entertainment to be had in reading about bad things happening to people, so long as you’re not the person in question. So I offer my bad things to brighten up your day.

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(Read Part One, here’s Part Two, here’s Part Three and here’s Part Four)

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In October, everyone turned evil. Maybe it was because of Halloween, maybe it was because as you get towards the end of any project you finally have to handle all the irritating details you’ve put off handling, maybe it’s because I’ve been cursed by an invisible witch for crimes I can barely remember, doomed to pay penance in this life for violating some obscure taboo in another. But as Dirt Candy entered the crunch Moto and Jerry both went from being normal guys, to being bad contractors and then joined Anthony as downright crooks. To recap: we were in October, there was no gas, we’d blown past three opening dates without a sign of slowing down, staff was hired, they were starting to ask questions I couldn’t answer like, “When do we open?” and my dwindling cash reserves were dwindling like they were competing in the Dwindle Olympics.

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What things looked like on October 14 (from the

back of the restaurant).

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One of the biggest problems with building Dirt Candy was my breasts. Or, to be more specific, the fact that I’m a woman. Contractors don’t listen to anyone, but they really don’t listen to women. From the time I hired Moto all the way through early October, I kept saying, “Please schedule the gas inspections. Please schedule the gas inspections. Please schedule the gas inspections.” I was sick of hearing myself say it. He kept telling me that Jerry the Plumber’s work wasn’t ready to be inspected. “Exactly,” I said. “But the inspections take weeks to schedule, so we need to schedule it now and Jerry will be ready when the inspection comes up.”

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Now, in early October, I discovered I might as well have been saying, “Gobble, Gobble, Gobble,” for all the good it did me – Moto never scheduled the gas inspection. We were not only going to open without gas, it was going to be months before the gas was ready because as he learned – surprise! – it takes weeks to schedule the gas inspections. Hadn’t someone just been saying that? On top of that, Moto was cutting corners big time. His electrician was so angry that he’d come in, scream at the wiring in Cantonese, scream at me in English if I asked any questions, and then vanish without the work being done. His very nice assistant wound up having to come in late a few days in a row to fix pretty much everything he touched. To this day, my outlets blow the breakers if you give them a dirty look

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The nice electrician’s assistant

in his white baseball hat. My guess is

that he’s trying to fix the stereo. I

would go on to spend $300 to hire someone

capable of hooking my ipod up to the stereo.

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Then there was The Cloud. The Cloud was the central design feature of the restaurant: a stretched piece of vinyl on a frame, concealing rows of adjustable LED lights that took up the entire ceiling. Unfortunately, as much as I love Craig, my architect, he didn’t realize that while the Cloud was able of dimming, brightening and turning every subtle shade of color under the sun, you had to have the right control panel to take advantage of its capabilities. Our control panel was not the right control panel. Our control panel was a big dimmer knob. Turn it and it would switch from bright yellow, to bright green, to bright purple, to bright blue – no dimming. Push the knob and it would cycle through a series of flashing light displays like something you’d find in a cheap karaoke bar somewhere in Inchon. Conveniently, the knob was located right in the middle of the wall in the most cramped part of the restaurant, guaranteeing that someone would hit it accidentally while pulling out ingredients at least once per night.

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But the bigger problem was that the Cloud was very, very bright. In my tiny space it was like having a UFO constantly landing right in the middle of the dining room every time I turned it on. The solution? A $3000 control panel. I didn’t have $3000 and so I lived with the unadjustable Cloud for almost a year. Finally, a friend came in and installed a $300 DMX board that let me manually lower the intensity of the cloud (he’s one of the assistant lighting designers on Memphis. Buy your tickets now!), but reviewers weren’t very nice about the lights in the meantime. I didn’t think they were all that bad, just a bit brighter than I wanted, but what do I know?

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To give credit where credit’s due,

Moto’s subcontractors were really good

woodworkers.

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But all these problems paled next to the scam Jerry was about to pull. We bit the bullet and opened with an entirely electric kitchen (you can see it here) at the end of October, with our gas inspection scheduled for December. Our inspection date arrived and it turned out that Craig’s expediter had forgotten to include the extra hot water heater we’d had to install (for our dishwasher) on the inspection application and Craig didn’t catch the omission. The result? Inspection fail. We had to re-apply from scratch with a 6 week wait at the minimum. Craig was so depressed by this (he’d also just had twins and might have been somewhat sleep deprived) that he called Jerry and asked how he could expedite the second inspection. “It’s a $5000 fee,” Jerry said. And so Craig paid $5000. To Jerry.

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In the midst of all this, we finally got to move in

late one October night. Two days before family meals

were scheduled to begin.

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Glory loves to organize. She and I were the

chefs at Pure Food and Wine soon after it opened, and if

she hadn’t helped me get Dirt Candy in order it

never would have opened.

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What happened next? What did Craig get for his $5000? First there was no inspection. Then no inspection. Then three weeks later: still no inspection. Finally, we called the plumbing company Jerry worked for. “No one asked us to expedite this,” they said. How much would it cost to expedite? “Well, you’d have to come out here and pick up the form and take it to the Department of Buildings yourself. And it’s a $125 fee.” So my husband rented a car, drove to their office, picked up the form, took it to the DOB and dropped it off. What happened to Craig’s $5000? “We don’t charge $5000 for expediting permits,” they said. So could they help us get Jerry to return Craig’s money? “That’s between you and Jerry,” they said.

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Friends and family meals begin. Without the Cloud

turned on we look like such a grim, serious

restaurant. See, the Cloud was necessary!

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I called Jerry and called Jerry, asking him to return Craig’s $5000. He didn’t take kindly to this. After trying one lie after another (”Craig never gave me the money,” “Then why am I looking at a canceled check?” “I used the money to expedite it,” “Then why did my husband stand in line at the DOB?”) he gave up and took off the mask. Previously, Jerry had been obsessed with me, calling me late at night and early in the morning for all kinds of made up reasons, talking at me for hours, once even telling me he loved me. Since he was a divorced, middle-aged plumber who stole my money I didn’t see a future for us, but I always humored him as best I could since it’s a bad idea to alienate your plumber when you’re trying to open a restaurant.  But now that he’d been caught lying he did what all contractors do when you catch them red handed: scream. Our relationship ended with him yelling at me on the sidewalk in front of Dirt Candy, calling me an evil woman, and no good, and a whore and a liar. No good? Whore? Liar? The irony wasn’t lost on me. Craig never did get his $5000.

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Friends and family from the outside, looking in.

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Oddly enough, it was around this time that I was calling Moto to ask him to finish working on the restaurant, and he started threatening me, too. I had withheld his final payment of $2000 because he was refusing to finish his work. Some days he’d show up, some days he wouldn’t. There were a hundred small details that needed to be finished, all work that was in the original plans, but Moto just couldn’t rouse himself to do it. Now he was calling Craig and saying that he was going to go to the Health Department and fabricate violations to get me closed down, and that he would report fabricated DOB violations as well. He would ruin me, he bragged. He would put me out of business. I was pretty sick of it at this point, and so I just stopped talking to him. He never called the DOB or the Health Department, and he never got his last $2000. As for the work? I paid another contractor $3000 to finish it, and some of it’s still not done. But Dirt Candy opened.

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We’re open for friends and family. Me, Debbie,

Jesus, Monica (daytime prep), and

the back of Kristen’s head.

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One year to the day after meeting with the Block Association, Dirt Candy opened. That’s one year, a lot of crying, a lot of screaming, a lot of yelling and getting ripped off and over a quarter of a million dollars later and I’ve got a 350 square foot vegetarian restaurant to show for it. Surprisingly, this is normal. Have you ever wondered why chefs are such jerks? Why they have such short tempers? It’s because they just built a restaurant. You think Gordon Ramsey is mean? With over 20 restaurants under his belt, screaming at people is an act of sublime self-control. I’m surprised he doesn’t just shoot them.

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The hardest thing about opening was adjusting to dealing with customers – normal people who wanted to sit in the restaurant and have dinner. After all the angst and stress I was deeply suspicious of the motives of these so-called “customers.” What did they want? Did they want my money? To tell me that the gas pipes were the wrong size? That they weren’t going to show up the next day unless I wrote them a check right there? Were they going to cry and call their mother? I finally got over it (compartmentalizing is a great skill of mine) but it was a year before I felt like the damage done to me was healed. Now all I have are the scars.  There was also the slowly dawning realization that all that work, all that money, all that stress that nearly wrecked my marriage, it was all so I could spend the rest of my life scraping plates, unclogging toilets, listening to people talk about their deadly serious allergy to purple food and sweating over a hot stove. There are all kinds of aphorisms about running a business, but the one that best applies to restaurants is: the customer is king. Why? Because the customer wasn’t dumb enough to build a restaurant in the first place.

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And within two weeks of being

open, our menu stand was broken

by evil people who hate Dirt Candy.

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I’d do it all over again. Of course I would. This is my life. But if you know anyone who plans on opening a restaurant, or dreams about it sometimes, send them to read this post. Because while no one can teach you how to open a restaurant, I can certainly show them how not to open a restaurant.

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