Construction in Midwest cities, Boston snarls restaurant traffic

Nation's Restaurant News,  May 27, 2002  by Carolyn Walkup

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Spring road construction often disrupts affected restaurant operators, but some major redevelopment work in such places as Boston, Chicago and suburban Minneapolis is presenting even bigger challenges.

Multiyear mega-projects now under way have been wreaking havoc with the operations of numerous restaurants in those cities.

Wacker Drive reconstruction in downtown Chicago has contributed to one restaurant's closing and numerous challenges for operators located along that major artery, which normally carries 250,000 cars a day. Several blocks of that elevated street bordering the Chicago River have been torn down and are being rebuilt, and cross-street intersections also are being closed in phases.

Caffe Baci, an Italian lunch and dinner cafe on the ground level of a prominent corner office high-rise on Wacker Drive, closed for good a few weeks ago and plans to relocate elsewhere. Street construction deterred many customers from coming to the cafe from outside the building, and the loss of two major in-building tenants further contributed to business losses there, said owner Joe DiCarlo.

"We were counting on a lot of street traffic," DiCarlo added. "Others on Wacker took a hit as well, but they were able to sustain the situation because their building populations remained."

Business at Catch 35 fell an estimated 5 percent to 10 percent in the past year, said Ken Karlson, marketing director for Taste America Restaurant Group. Since a section of Wacker Drive directly in front of Catch 35 and the closest cross-street intersection have reopened, business has come back to normal, he said.

"We just tried to stay positive and have fun with it," he said, recalling a radio advertising slogan the restaurant used with a tag line, "Walk the plank at Catch 35," which referred to a temporary wooden sidewalk the construction company built. He also credited the city with building a new pedestrian entrance to the restaurant.

"The city did everything it could possibly do to help us," Karlson said. Extra advertising the company did on theater ticket envelopes also helped to pull in some pretheater business that otherwise might have been lost.

Operators of Nick & Tony's, which currently is accessible by a wooden sidewalk, have opened their outdoor cafe on schedule, figuring many customers are willing to put up with the mess in order to sit outside in nice weather. "The heavy jackhammering is gone," general manager Paul Sciamanda said. "Our April was better than last year by about 10 percent."

His main current concern is to be sure that the reservationist gives good directions to everyone who is not sure how to get to the restaurant. "You need to be careful about walking them through it because it gets so confusing," said Sciamanda, who estimated that year-to-year sales were down about 4 percent.

Mossant Bistro in the Hotel Monaco now is coping with the closing of the adjacent intersection and installation of a high chain-link fence to close in the construction site. "All you can do is roll with it," said Scott Dahlin, the bistro's general manager, who added that many people assume incorrectly that the restaurant is closed.

The restaurant is beefing up promotions and direct- mail campaigns, touting a new tongue-in-cheek slogan, "Hardest restaurant in the city to get into."

In Boston many operators continue to cope with the Big Dig, the massive 10-year federal project that is building an underground expressway. "If the Big Dig wasn't here, we'd do double the business," said a spokesman for Joseph's on High.

"We moved here because this area will be the place to be around 2006," he said, when the Big Dig is supposed to be finished. "But we're still suffering till it's done."

Business also has fallen at The Good Life and The Vault, both owned by Brian O'Neill. Weekend business has been most affected by suburbanites' reluctance to drive into the city construction zone, he said.

Keeping an optimistic outlook, O'Neill said the city and the mayor have done a great job of keeping businesses informed. "It's just one of the many trials and tribulations of a small-restaurant operator," he said.

Minneapolis is another metropolitan area with frequent street and highway construction projects, including the current one on Highway 100, a major artery through the western suburbs. With different entrance-and-exit ramps closing and reopening, confused potential customers constantly are calling restaurants like 13 Moons in Robbinsdale for directions.

"They have to take other exits, and it changes from day to day," said 13 Moons' co-owner, Roxy Herman, noting that the construction has created a great deal of inconvenience.

Sapor Cafe & Bar on Washington Avenue in Minneapolis is celebrating the reopening of the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, following a lengthy street repair project that proved "financially and psychologically devastating," owner Julie Steenerson said. Sapor just had opened last summer when the road work began, which compounded the problems customers had with finding the restaurant.