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The second 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 my bad things to brighten up your day.

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(Read Part One: The Beginning)

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I had a location. I had (almost definitely) a liquor license. I had an architect (the long-suffering Craig Kim of Audo Architecture). Now I needed a contractor. Choosing a contractor is a bit like choosing your mugger – you want someone who won’t hit you in the face and will maybe let you keep $5 for cab fare. Unfortunately, we didn’t find that kind of mugger. We interviewed a couple of contractors and whittled it down to two: Moto and Anthony. Actually, when I say “whittle” what I mean is that these were the only two who would show up at meetings and give us a quote. This was taking place in late 2007 and that was when the real estate boom was going big and most contractors were imitating Naomi Campbell and wouldn’t get out of bed for under $10,000.

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This is what Dirt Candy looked

like at this point.

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Moto was a nice guy who had done a lot of work building restaurants in the East Village, but he played his cards close to his chest. I wanted a communicator, someone who would keep me in the loop, and Anthony and his foreman, Colin, seemed genuine, nice, kind and efficient. They would give us schedules, updates, weekly site meetings and paperwork tracking the project. It seemed wonderful – contractors who would talk to us and keep us informed of their own free will. Sure they hadn’t built a restaurant before but they seemed game for the challenge and this space is only 350 square feet. What could go wrong?

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Everything.

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It took me a while before I realized that their commitment to openness and paperwork and communication was a smokescreen. These two guys were con artists of the highest order. And I was their target. Someone I met later told me that the golden rule of contracting is: Establish a Presence. Once a contractor is on site, it’s impossible to get him out and that’s exactly how Anthony and Colin played me. The demolition happened fast, and then there were a few quick walls thrown up and then…the project dragged. It lagged. They told us that it was taking a long time to level the walls and the floor. They told us they needed more money to level the ceiling. Every time I went to the space they were leveling. They were obsessed with leveling.

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Look! It’s Anthony waving at you.

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But worse than that, Anthony was crazy. One day he didn’t show up at a site meeting. Colin took me aside and told me that Anthony was in the hospital and that he’d had a nervous breakdown. Then he told me that I could pay him instead of Anthony and he would take over the job and it would continue like nothing had ever happened. He told me that Anthony was scamming us and was funneling our money to other jobs of his that had gone over budget and needed cash. He said that Anthony had burned through most of our money and hadn’t done the work he said he’d done, he hadn’t ordered the custom built items that were supposed to be ordered and that payments to subcontractors he said had been made, hadn’t been. In short, according to Colin, Anthony was ripping us off. He promised that if I gave him the job he wouldn’t rip me off because he liked me.

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The entire floor had to be rebuilt.

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I was a little confused by all this and so I called Anthony’s mother (who manages his company) and wound up being screamed at: her darling son was in the hospital and they’d tell me what was going to happen next when they felt like it. The next day, Anthony’s Dad was at the space and he announced that he would take over the job. If I didn’t like it, tough. I still wasn’t convinced this nervous breakdown was anything more than a way for Anthony to avoid a site meeting where Craig and I would ask him questions he couldn’t answer about money and the time table, but you do not want to change contractors in the middle of a job and the only way forward was to go forward.

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One of many site meetings. In retrospect,

they were all a waste of time.

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So we had our meeting with Anthony’s daddy and when it was done he told me I was dismissed and could skip along home. I told him thanks, but I was fine, and since I owned the place I’d probably be around for a bit. He stomped outside in a man-sulk until I had left the building. A day later, Anthony was back on the job and Colin acted like nothing had happened. Daddy didn’t reappear for a while. No one talked about me being ripped off. No one mentioned Anthony’s “nervous breakdown” But that was when their finely constructed web of lies began to unravel.

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This pipe was moved dozens of times. Every time,

they’d close up the wall, realize it was in the

wrong place, cut open the wall and move it

again. I should have know this was a bad sign.

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I say “web of lies” but that’s not quite accurate. Everything Anthony said was a lie, or crazy. At one point, the two worlds of “liar” and “crazy person” collided when he claimed he’d ordered a custom built door, then said it was delayed, then said the company wasn’t taking his calls and that we’d have to find a new door. I called the company myself and discovered that they had never heard of Anthony. He’d never called. I confronted him about this in a site meeting and he began to get angry. Then he asked if I was calling him a liar. Pretty much, I said. Instantly he got on his cell phone and called his mother. “Mom,” he whined. “She’s calling me a liar. I’m not a liar. I’m good! I’m good!” I quietly excused myself and left him to his long, angry phone call of sadness. Maybe he hadn’t been lying about that nervous breakdown after all.

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Craig did his best with these guys, but the more I talked to their subcontractors and vendors the clearer it became that they were flat-out lying to me. Items they said they’d ordered were not ordered. Materials that were supposed to cost some exorbitant price were actually quite reasonable when I talked to the suppliers directly. And then, in the middle of the job, Anthony asked for $70,000 in a change order*. Change orders are a natural part of any building project, but a $70,000 change order takes your breath away. Some of it was for leveling. Some of it was flat-out crazy. I refused to pay because, apart from the leveling, they couldn’t tell me where the previous $70,000 I’d paid them had gone. We scheduled a meeting to work out what we would and wouldn’t pay in this change order and, not surprisingly, Anthony didn’t show. Colin told me he was sick. I called him and after yelling at him on the phone for a while he agreed to come in. He claimed he had a migraine and during the meeting he gave little coughs and pinched the bridge of his nose a lot, making pained expressions and generally being a drama queen. He reminded me of nothing more than a little kid trying to fake sick and stay home from school. After he left the meeting I never saw him again.

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Electrical work was not their

strong suit. All of it would have to be

re-wired after they left.

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The next day I received in the mail legal notice from Anthony’s lawyer that they were walking off the job because we’d broken the contract by not paying the change order. They’d submitted this change order on a Thursday, we got the letter from his lawyer five days later on the Tuesday right after our Monday “Migraine Meeting,” meaning that he’d already talked to a lawyer about getting out of this job well in advance of even submitting the change order to us. But now it was official: Anthony and Colin were off the job.

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This is how Dirt Candy looked when they

left. Almost exactly the same as it looked

six months earlier when they arrived.

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In the process of their being gone, lots of things seemed to go missing. Thousands of dollars in supplies and materials, many of which were hard to order, suddenly vanished. Dirt Candy was supposed to open in May of 2008. Now it was April, 2008 and the restaurant was a shell. Worse than that, after all that leveling, it wasn’t level. It turns out that the finely constructed web of lies they’d given me was the only finely constructed thing about Dirt Candy. We’d be starting essentially from scratch with our next contractor. The top of the walls were three inches further apart than the bottom. The floor was lumpy and the walls would have to be torn out and re-done, along with most of the wiring and plumbing work. I was out almost $100,000 and only had $35,000 worth of work to show for it. But I had no choice, I was so far down the tunnel that I had to keep going forward. Like a shark, if a restaurant construction project stops moving, it dies.

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And so I went back to our original runner-up for the position of contractor, Moto. He would have to start the project over almost from the beginning. And this is where my troubles really began.

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A goodbye present from Anthony and Colin:

a bottle of their urine. Classy!

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(Tune in for Part 3 of “How Not to Build a Restaurant” in just a couple of weeks!)

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* “Change order” – this is how your contractor really screws you. The plans for a construction project are a legally binding document, like a contract. If you make any change to them after they’ve been accepted by you and the contractor it’s called a change order. The contractor gives you a quote for the extra work, your architect or project manager approves the change order or doesn’t approve it, and this becomes a legally binding part of the plans. However, it’s open to all kinds of shenanigans. The contractor can agree to build you a door but god help you if they say the doorknob wasn’t in the original plans – that doorknob is now a change order and they can say it costs anything they choose. I had one contractor (not Anthony) put a padlock my basement door. The hardware for this was bought down the street for $7. The labor took 15 minutes. The cost? $175.

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