did I say open in May?

When we first signed our lease in February we had aggressive ambitions that have since been sidetracked by reality. As I said in another post, in my mind opening Pica's was tearing out a couple of walls, putting in some other walls, equipment moves in and voila we have a restaurant. But I was woefully mistaken. There is a lot more into transforming a restaurant space than I had initially accounted for and it has turned into a much larger project. 

After stepping back and assessing where this thing needed to go to get done properly we've decided on a contractor and things will begin moving pretty quickly. 

The walls should be coming down by the middle of next week. Building permits will hopefully be approved around the same time giving the green light to start putting other walls up and getting the plumbing and electrical in. 

The landlord got the exhaust fans cleaned up and they looked brand new as compared to the grease covered mess they were a week ago.

This weekend we'll be working on the back patio and trying to transform that space into something intimate and enjoyable. 

Our designer, the man responsible for the logo and the look, Justin Fuller of www.pencilpluspaper.com, has been hard at work brainstorming ideas for menus and other touchpoints. With little concrete direction from me he's managed to build a pretty sweet library of graphics and ideas. I'm psyched to see how it all comes together in the end. 

I'm hoping that before long he'll contribute a guest post as to what goes into his side of things because I think he deserves a lot of credit for keeping us excited about this thing. 

Hopefully next week about this time I'll have some photos of the space as it's shaping up.