Text 24154, 63 rader
Skriven 2007-12-16 00:56:00 av JIM WELLER (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av JOAN MACDIARMID
Ärende: Re: Poplar culchur 533
==============================
-=> Quoting Joan Macdiarmid to Dale Shipp <=-

 JM> Have you noted there are certain locations that seem
 JM> to be death for restaurant enterprises? I don't know
 JM> why, either.

That's a big mystery with no answer which is one reason (out of
many) restaurants are hard to finance. Locations that look good in
theory just don't pan out. Before I was a Realtor, I was a banker
and before that I worked for an industrial finance company that
financed quite a few places. There were two in particular that stand
out in my memory.

The first one had everything going for it: good location on a busy
street, not too many restaurants in the area, at an intersection
with stop lights so that that it was easy to access from the side
street, big parking lot, near a hospital (lots of staff lunches,
well paid shift workers, tons of patients' visitors going by) a
brand new well designed building, brand new state of the art
kitchen, owners with deep pockets (a group of doctors), staff with
lots of experience (the head chef had been a sous chef at a high end
steak house for over a decade, the front end manager had been doing
the same at a middle of the road Italian steak, pasta and pizza
place for years), a safe menu with just a few innovations (steak
houses and seafood places were all the rage in the 70's in Ottawa
and these guys offered steaks, plus prime rib with Yorkshire pudding
and seafood including one of the first live lobster tanks in the
city). It never developed a clientele and lasted six months.

The second one had nothing going for it: edge of downtown but not in
the prime business district, a slummy mixed neighbourhood with pawn
shops etc, no neighbourhood drawing card, no nearby parking, no free
parking at all, a quirky weird business plan that revolved around
European draft beer (not in fashion then) and Irish and Celtic live
folk music (definitely not in fashion) and no money for renovations
(poorly lit basement, steam pipes running along the ceiling, faded
institutional green paint). For some reason nurses dropped in a lot,
then cops and firemen dropped by, perhaps to meet the nurses. Being
shift workers they kept it busy at all hours, all week long and not
just Friday and Saturday nights. And suddenly it was the hottest
singles bar in the city. Everybody came, and everybody complained
about the peeling green paint and the inadequate washrooms but they
kept on coming because it was Popular. Shortly thereafter the music
became popular too and these guys claimed to have started it all.
They paid off their five year loans in one year and opened up a
second place in Montreal with cash.









Cheers

YK Jim


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