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The first in a series of posts about how Dirt Candy came to be built. 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 other people, so I’m offering up my bad things to brighten up your day.

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There comes a point in a mountain climber’s life when they want to climb Mount Everest. There comes a point in a speed freak’s life when they want to get ripped out of their minds and drive really fast the wrong way down the highway. And there comes the point in a chef’s life when they want to open a restaurant; the mountain climber and the speed freak look pretty smart in comparison. A little over two years ago I decided to open Dirt Candy. I’d been working for other people for about ten years and I was dying to do something new with vegetarian food and I was tired of working really, really hard for people who didn’t work really, really hard.

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Viola marks the spot where Dirt Candy

will be built.

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A friend said to me, “You’ve opened so many restaurants for other people, opening your own will be a piece of cake.” And it was a piece of cake, if by “cake” you mean a cake with a spring-loaded sledgehammer in the middle of it that hits you in the face over and over again. And then, just when you’ve gotten used to the sledgehammer, it starts shooting razor sharp knives at you. That kind of cake.
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Opening a restaurant in New York is gruesomely expensive and it takes an insanely long time, but somehow the city’s wound up with almost 19,000 of them. Over half of these will fail because you don’t get rich if you decide to open a restaurant, your lawyer does. There are two ways to wind up with a restaurant on your hands: build one or buy one. Either option will send your lawyer’s kids to college. Buying one is the easier option. Your lawyer’s kid can get into a really good state school with this option. You simply find a restaurant that’s closed or failing and you offer the owner what’s known as “key money,” a lump sum to buy out their lease, get their all-important liquor license transferred to you, and then you take possession of the space and everything in it.
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I tried that first. I found a failing restaurant on the Lower East Side and spent a lot of time and money (engineering assessment, legal fees) trying to seal the deal. Ultimately, the negotiations fell apart because the owner, a chef so full of hatred for humanity that he could barely breathe, wanted his $200,000 key money in cash.
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“You mean a cashier’s check?” I asked.
“No. Cash.” He said. “In a bag.”
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I stopped calling him back.
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Then I decided to build my restaurant. This is the option that will send your lawyer’s kid on an Ivy League ride, posh wardrobe and books included. I found a 350 square foot storefront in the East Village that had been abandoned years ago. It was so rotten that every piece of wood had to be replaced, the floor was missing, the facade was sagging, the pipes and wiring weren’t up to code and the basement – which we needed to use for storage – had been used to shoot the terrifying basement scenes in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS 2: QUIETER AND WOOLIER. The landlord was only too happy to find suckers who would rent this eyesore. We were informed that any human remains we unearthed would be re-buried at our expense.

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What the kitchen used to look like.

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Now, two important things had to happen. First, we needed a liquor license. To get it we would have to meet with the block association, then with Community Board 3, then it would be passed up to the State Liquor Board. This process would enable our lawyer to send his kid to grad school, but without a liquor license a restaurant will die a dog’s death. You need that marked-up wine to stay in business  and, more importantly, if you ever need to sell your space a liquor license is the difference between $50,000 in key money and $200,000 in key money, especially in the eatery-and-bar-clogged East Village where liquor licenses are harder and harder to come by.
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Then I needed to hire my contractor. This is a bit like choosing your mugger. They’re all going to hurt you, but you want the one who’ll hurt you least. So, while I started looking for a contractor, I also began jumping through the endless series of hoops required to get my liquor license.

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First, I needed to meet with the block association to get their thumbs up before proceeding to the community board who would review my application and then decide on whether or not to block it or pass it on to the state liquor board. Some people I know firmly believe that meeting with the block association is a waste of time. Their lawyers tell them not to bother. These people are the same people who wind up having their liquor license denied and then they sue the community board and their lawyers get rich while they sit there, trying to keep their doors open while the endless legal gymnastics are performed and they watch their business die by inches. If I could give anyone some advice on opening a restaurant, it’s this: meet with the block association. These people are your future neighbors. They were on this block long before you and they’ll like be there long after you’re just another snarky farewell post on Eater. You want the block association on your side.

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The block association for East Ninth Street insisted on meeting on Halloween. This was somewhat fitting, because they were terrifying. No sooner had the meeting begun than they ripped into me as if I had suggested putting in a gateway to Hell right next door to their homes.   One woman set her cell phone to go off in ten minutes.
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“I’m going to yell at you for the next ten minutes,” she said. “So if I don’t hear my alarm go off, just let me know and I’ll stop.”
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And she did. Then her cell phone alarm went off and she stopped and became completely pleasant. That seemed to be par for the course. After this ordeal, the block association members turned out to be the most supportive people in this process, even going so far as to appear at the community board meeting and drop off a letter in support of Dirt Candy. I see them every day and they’re the nicest bunch of people, completely different from how they appeared that Halloween night. And after being on this block for a while, I get their point.

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Building owners are protective of their neighborhoods down here because nothing much has changed for the better over the last few years in the East Village. More college kids have moved in, smokers throng the sidewalks outside bars, banks move in, leaving once brightly-lit streets dark at night, and residents watch their neighborhood become more desirable to outsiders and less desirable to longtime residents, simultaneously. If I had been on the block association and someone came in wanting to open a restaurant, with all its headaches and all its potential rodent infestations, new garbage pickups and more delivery trucks and the threat of crowds of posh people littering the sidewalk smoking their Parliaments and American Spirits, I would have acted just as tough. Probably worse.
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After the block association meeting we moved on to the community board meeting. This is the infamous Community Board No. 3, the bane of restauranteurs and East Village and Lower East Side residents alike. The community board meeting itself was a different kind of ordeal: it was a test of my endurance. My team – myself, my lawyer and my husband – arrived at 6pm, made our way through a throng of protesters who didn’t want a liquor license approved for the Bowery Hotel, and then we sat. And we sat. And we sat. Our application was finally reviewed sometime between midnight and one in the morning. I would be more specific but at that point time and space had collapsed in on themselves and concepts like “minutes” and “hours” had ceased to exist.

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We watched almost 20 applications go before ours, and it was like water torture, killing my brain cells one applicant at a time. There were interns there from a local college who had made overhead projections using Google Maps to show where each applicant was located. They were bright-eyed and bushy tailed, eager and enthusiastic. Ninety minutes into the meeting the light had gone out of their eyes. They left less than halfway through, spirits thoroughly crushed.

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We watched as a Chinese restaurant got crucified by a disbelieving community board for messing up their neighborhood petition. Each restaurant has to get its neighbors to sign a petition saying that they do not object to having a restaurant with a liquor license on their block. This restaurant turned in its petition with signatures on it from New Jersey and beyond. One person who signed it was from Canada. We watched a woman who ran a Turkish joint that had numerous violations against it try to brazen her way through the questions.
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“Do you have live music?”
“No. I do not have live music.”
“But you advertise having a sitar player.”
“No. I do not.”
“But we have one of your ads.”
“No. That’s not my ad.”
“But it has your restaurant’s name on it.”
“Maybe.”
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We watched two hapless fellows who were trying to open a pizza joint on Avenue A which is in one of the community board’s proscribed zones where no new licenses can be given. They had sunk their life savings into the place and everyone felt sorry for them. Even the community board tried to give them a chance.
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“Do you understand what it means that we can not give a license for this area unless you are filling some kind of need for the community. Is there anything you’re doing that could count as serving the community. Anything?”
“We serve pizza.”
“Right, but is there anything you do that can serve as some sort of special service to the community?”
“No. Just pizza.”
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Denied.
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When they finally heard our license it was all a bit anti-climactic. One of the partners in Apotheke had just gone before us and used the phrase “cocktail enthusiast” so many times that the board’s collective heads were spinning, so they really didn’t have any questions for us. We have no cocktail enthusiasts coming to Dirt Candy, only tofu enthusiasts, and that doesn’t sound as sexy. When we stumbled out onto the street after one in the morning the protesters were gone and we now had our liquor license. No, wait. We had merely gotten cleared for the community board to give the thumbs up on our application to the State Liquor Board so that, months down the road, they could give us our liquor license. And we still didn’t have a contractor.

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We would find one in the next few weeks, and that’s when our problems really began.

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To see pictures of Dirt Candy as it gets built, go to our Facebook page and check out the photo album entitled, “Dirt Candy: Before She was Pretty.”