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Soup to Nuts
Designing a restaurant from the ground up doesn't look easy.
And it's not as easy as it looks
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Business New Haven
4/16/2001
By: Priscilla Searles
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Fitting out a new restaurant can be a Herculean, multi-faceted task. Just ask the owners of Playwright.
Never heard of it? You will. The newest Playwright - an Irish pub and restaurant slated to open mid-year on Temple Street in downtown New Haven opposite the Omni-New Haven Hotel - is actually Playwright No. 5 for proprietors Eamonn Ryan and Dennis and Richard Guilfoyle. (The others are in Hamden, Stamford, New York and South Miami Beach.)
The first hurdle the trio encountered was finding a promising location. “We were looking for a town on the way up,” says Dennis Guilfoyle, the general contractor. “We wanted a college town with good nightlife, and we knew we needed 10,000 to 14,000 square feet.” For those who think of Irish pubs as dark and cozy, Guilfoyle points out that the trend in Ireland now is to have “pubs” of 8,000 square feet and up.
Once the site has been selected, the real work begins. For this team it meant walking in the door and seeing what jumped out at them. For Guilfoyle, there's something about a site that gives you an idea what the possibilities are, even if you are taking down all four walls and starting over.
Before a single nail can be driven or the first sub-contractor hired, a design must be developed. “That's when you lose sleep for a month, “ says Guilfoyle, “trying to figure out what you want. This is when the sketching begins. The three of us just kept kicking ideas back and forth and we finally developed a plan of what we wanted this Playwright to look like.”
The first layout decisions Ryan and the Guilfoyles made was the location, and then the design of the bar and counter - key to the traffic flow of Playwright.
“To develop a specific design for the restaurant we took over 2,000 pictures of architectural details that were available to us from the United States and Europe and put them up on one wall,” says Guilfoyle. “We have about ten suppliers in Europe that we purchase materials from. With the pictures on the wall, we try to imagine this item placed there, another item in the corner.”
The 2,000 photos were then narrowed down, with similar objects placed together. The next step is to scan photos of objects that are going to be placed together onto one sheet to give a better idea how the items will work together.
“At this point a concept begins to jump out at you,” says Guilfoyle. “We were also influenced by New Haven's Gothic [architectural] style.”
Placement of critical areas, such as the kitchen and banquet hall, were decided upon first. With scan sheets in hand the sketching became more detailed. Once accomplished, an architect from Stamford, Ted Catino of Catino & Associates, was hired to do the drawings that would be used for construction.
The engineering work, also handled at this stage, was performed by Peter Isidro-Cloudas, who works with Catino. Town codes have to be dealt with and the architect can advise on what's feasible and might change things around to fit local building-code requirements.
With specs for construction and blueprints completed, it's now time to sit down with the electrical contractor, plumbing and HVAC (heating, ventilation and air-conditioning) people, fire-prevention specialists - all the sub-contractors who are going to be involved.
Guilfoyle points out that these professionals must be able to work together smoothly as a team, performing disparate tasks toward a unified objective. Having a meeting of all the contractors at the beginning of the job is a key step in the process.
With building permits in hand, the fit-out begins. The prep work and framing is done first. In the meantime, Ryan sits down with the chef to lay out the kitchen.
“We have to establish where the food is coming in and out of the kitchen,” explains Ryan, “where the cooking line is going to be. We have to design kitchen storage, location of refrigerators, freezers, dishwashers, walk-in coolers, hot and cold sections, salad area, dessert station, coffee and tea location. The kitchen must work efficiently.”
Laying out the kitchen is just the first part of a massive layout challenge. Placement of restrooms, staff area, office space must be decided - and of course seating of actual patrons must be decided.
The 14,000-square-foot Playwright site will have 11,000 to 12,000 square feet of public space; the remainder will house kitchen, restrooms and office. The public space will include booths, an open floor plan with high gothic tables and gothic bar stools in front of a bar that was built in the 17th century as a gazebo-type structure once located in a monastery. Relocating the 25-by-12 foot structure, built using no screws or nails, required numbering each piece before it was disassembled and shipped to the U.S. Reassembling the unusual structure was no simple task.
To make a good first impression to their new hometown, Ryan and the Guilfoyles, were determined to use as many local contractors as possible. One, Dermott Doran of Hamden, owner of A.R. Mendillo, was hired as the electrical contractor.
Responsible for lighting Temple Street and Chapel Street and the Temple Street Interior Plaza, among other projects, Doran is responsible for the lighting fixtures, power for everything including the kitchen, computers, fire alarm and cooler system.
“I have to figure two to three months for a job like this,” explains Doran. “It's such a specialized design I have to have great patience. And because this is a team effort, getting along with everyone is critical.”
Jim Bailey Enterprises of New Haven is handling the steel and concrete work. “I'm putting in the structure beams, the metal studding and sheetrock, “ says Bailey. “This job is complicated because there are numerous levels, styles and a lot of space. In addition, there are four levels off the main floor, ranging in height from four feet to ten feet.”
Sections of Playwright will be partitioned by theme, with each posing its own construction challenges. A second level will house a Victorian-style library for dining, another section will look like an old chemists shop and still another will have suggest an old church with leather benches, several pulpits and a church organ. A fourth area will look like an old Irish cottage.
One of the more daunting tasks will be to install three stone arches from Wales, which will have stained glass in the rear of them. Guilfoyle disassembled the arches himself and had them shipped to New Haven. Other architectural details that have been selected for the restaurant offer similarly daunting installation challenges.
The biggest challenge, of course, is to coordinate the work of all the contractors, having one step done so the electrical contractor can run wiring around the framing, having enough of the bar constructed so the heating pipes can be installed, and so on and so forth.
So often construction is a matter of, “Hurry up and wait.” It's clear how having contractors meet with one another up front to cement them as a team can help a job run more smoothly, in spite of - or perhaps because of - the unforeseen obstacles that arise on nearly every job.
Although not all restaurants have construction challenges as great as Playwright, all face the same basic steps in preparing for an opening: location, theme, design, contractors, permits, layout challenges. All this for a pint of stout and some shepherd's pie.
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