Reopening a Restaurant in New York City Can Be a Total Nightmare
The new bar at Black Crescent. Photo by Eric Medsker.

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Reopening a Restaurant in New York City Can Be a Total Nightmare

Ever since his Belgian french fry shop was destroyed in a fire last year, the owner of Pommes Frites has been trying to rebuild and reopen—but like other restaurant owners in New York City, he's realized that's easier said than done.

On March 26, 2015, Omer Shorshi, the co-owner of Pommes Frites in New York City's East Village, was at home with his sick son. His popular Belgian-style French fry shop does most of its business in the evening and into the early hours of the morning, when it serves up fries in paper cones to buzzed customers coming from one of the hundreds of nearby bars. At home, as he cared for his son, he got a call from his business partner telling him there was a fire at the shop. On TV, he saw three buildings completely ablaze, including his restaurant.

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To his relief, everyone made it out of his shop unscathed, but two people died in the building next door on Second Avenue, where the fire started. The blaze was the result of a massive gas explosion—tied to an illegal gas hookup—that blew the brick façade off the front of the building. Shorshi's office, where he typically would have been at that time of day, was in the basement right next door.

By the time Shorshi arrived the next day, after the firefighters had reopened the street, he could only survey smoldering rubble. The buildings had collapsed the night before.

"It was our livelihood for 18 years, and in a few hours it was gone," he said.

In the face of calamity, Shorshi and his business partner were determined to rebuild. More than a year later, however, they still haven't reopened.

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The Second Avenue explosion destroyed three buildings, including the Pommes Frites shop. Photo by Cem Ozdel/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images. Black Crescent's chef Dustin Everett stands in the rubble of his bar after the fire. Photo by Andrew Segreti.

Just over two months before the explosion at Pommes Frites and less than a mile away on the Lower East Side, the cocktail and seafood bar Black Crescent had just wrapped up its popular happy hour. Dollar oysters were a big draw, as were their navy-strength cocktails. In the lull before the night crowd came en masse, one of the kitchen staff told chef Dustin Everett he smelled smoke. Sure enough, smoke was billowing from the basement.

Everett and Michael Reynolds, a co-owner of the bar who was bartending, went down to find the entire basement engulfed in flames. Near a desk in the basement office was a case of Rittenhouse Rye, an over-proof whiskey, and the bottles began to explode. They later found corks stuck in parts of the ceiling that had melted. A few weeks before, they had celebrated their first anniversary in business.

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In no time, the fire department was there to put out the fire. They had to break all the windows to hose the place down. One of the firefighters from the station down the street told co-owner Carlos Baz, "I'm so sad you guys are gone. I've only been here a couple of times, but I got laid both times I was here.

"Great bar," he added.

After a night spent drinking, they turned to the task of trying to open the bar back up. They began to go through the motions. Con Edison showed up to turn the gas off. The fire inspector and fire chief arrived and did a sweep to be sure there was no foul play. As suspected, it was an electrical fire.

There was some suspicion that the fire may have started from a desktop printer. The printer company's insurance inspector came in to check it out, as did a rotating cast of financially or legally vested intermediaries. "We had like 15 people in the basement," Baz said. "Fire inspectors, engineers, lawyers—everyone just making sure they're covered.

"The first month following the fire, we couldn't touch anything."

After that, they cleaned the space out and started rebuilding. It was February. There was a back-and-forth with insurers, and a question as to whether Black Crescent's insurance was responsible for certain items or whether the landlord's insurer was. The bar smelled like a campfire for months.

Things moved along, though, and by the end of May, the bar looked good to go. Based on what they were told by engineers and others familiar with the process of working with the Department of Buildings, the owners were optimistic that they could open up again by June. They purchased $15,000 worth of liquor to stock the bar and told former employees that they would be reopening soon. Many of them left other jobs to come back to Black Crescent. All that was left to do was to call Con Edison to turn the gas back on and file some final paperwork.

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Photo by Andrew Segreti.1984

"We were thinking that would be a relative punctuation mark on the whole process," Baz said. "Con Ed said, 'Hey, you guys look great. Just get the DOB [Department of Buildings] to sign off on this first.'"

That's when the trouble started. They had installed a new boiler and a 12-inch piece of pipe, and a DOB inspector told them they needed a permit for the new equipment. Their plumber filed for the permit on their behalf, but after a week, their application was denied—the application was filed online, and they were supposed to submit a paper application in person. Then their paper application was denied two weeks after submission—the DOB says Black Crescent's plumber hadn't filled out the second page of the form, where the plumber signs and stamps his seal.

"It's like the Ministry of Information in the book ," Baz said. "You put something through the window and you don't know what happens to it until it comes out the other side and it's different."

Weeks turned into months, and Black Crescent was denied several more times, for failure to show the location of a valve, another missing page from an application, a clerical error and other issues.

"While we empathize with this business owner… there was a basis to the various objections to this application," a representative of the DOB told MUNCHIES. "Maintaining strict oversight over gas plumbing work is a high priority for the Department as a matter of public safety."

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Black Crescent hired an expediter, someone who went to the DOB office in person on their behalf to file the same form several times throughout the day in the hopes that the forms would cross different desks. The expediter told Black Crescent one of their forms was rejected because it wasn't on double-sided paper. After five months, Black Crescent was approved—only after the expediter tracked down previous tenants about old blueprints and forms, and dug up archival blueprints on microfilm. She told Black Crescent she'd never seen anything like it.

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Black Crescent co-owner Michael Reynolds. Photo by Andrew Segreti.

Black Crescent and a local blog had speculated the delays were in part due to a new level of caution at the DOB in the wake of the Second Avenue explosion, as well as a 2014 gas explosion in East Harlem, which leveled two buildings, killed eight people, and injured at least 50 others.

A National Transportation Safety Board review faulted New York City and Con Ed for the Harlem explosion, which they blamed in part on poor welding. Speaking to MUNCHIES, an employee of the DOB said there were no new protocols introduced following either explosion. Last month, however, the DOB announced it is hiring 22 inspectors that will have to sign off on all gas plumbing jobs before gas can be turned on. A press release for the new certification system mentions both explosions.

Black Crescent had more problems when it tried to carry over the certification for their fire suppression system, and ultimately they had to get their system recertified—a process involving engineers, inspectors, and the fire department—as the owners were unable to use blueprints that were dated prior to 2006, which is what they had. That took another month and a half. Along the way, they spoke with about a dozen different people as they hunted down records from previous tenants, and were set back weeks for two more clerical errors.

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Photo by Andrew Segreti. Outside Pommes Frites, before the fire that destroyed it. Photo courtesy of Pommes Frites.

Black Crescent finally reopened at the end of February, more than a year after the fire. It had been a challenging year for the restaurant and its employees, financially and otherwise. Adding a bit of insult to injury, the DOB switched to electronic filing for all of its applications toward the end of the process, something that could have saved Black Crescent considerable time and headache.

But business is brisk, and they're back on their feet. Reynolds, Baz, and Everett felt helpless at times throughout the process, but they don't fault any specific person for denying their application or sending them on a runaround.

"Everyone we've worked with, the Department of Buildings, Con Ed, the fire department, they've all been really great. They're doing their jobs," Reynolds said. "Its not them—it's the system that's fucked."

And it's one, he says, that seems to be stacked against business owners and goes against the spirit of a bootstrapping city where people have come for centuries to open businesses and make a go of it. "In order to be able to make it they have to have a million dollars to open it up? That's crazy. It doesn't seem right," Reynolds said.

"I have a friend opening a bar in Denver, and it's taken him half the time to open as its taken us to get a permit," he said. "If we were on Long Island, it would be a lot easier."

Back at Pommes Frites, Shorshi has had to make some changes. He could no longer afford a location in the East Village—many spaces were asking double the $5,000 monthly rent he had been paying—and has, unbelievably to older New Yorkers, found a more affordable place in Greenwich Village near New York University. He's adding seating and managed to secure a liquor license.

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But Pommes Frites had hang-ups, too, despite having a sympathetic ear at the DOB, given that they were victims of the Second Avenue explosion. Pommes Frites worked with the Department of Small Business Services, who extended Pommes Frites a loan and offered to help them navigate the approval process at the DOB as a sort of middleman. But they ran into similar difficulties at the SBS as Black Crescent did at the DOB.

Shorshi says they were told to change one architectural detail by one person, only to have another person tell them that the change had to be undone. Like Black Crescent, the process with the SBS took five months.

"Everyone really tried to help us, but it's a really big bureaucracy," Shorshi said.

Pommes Frites was aiming to open in late April, but it slipped by. Shorshi is currently waiting on a new gas meter from Con Edison, hopefully one of the final steps on a long road to reopening.

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Pommes Frites' famous fries. Photo courtesy of Pommes Frites.

Black Crescent knows what the wait feels like, and took some solace that it wasn't personal. Opening a business, building things, and finding success in New York City isn't easy. Regulations are tight because they have to be—shoddy workmanship in such a dense place is dangerous.

"It was nice to feel like we weren't being attacked, because it feels that way," Baz said.

But on the bright side, at least they can say it was a learning experience.

"By opening a bar twice, we now know how to open one bar," Reynolds said.