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Site Visits: A Tale of Two Cities
We walked through the Schaumburg space today at the Hyatt Woodfield. Man, there's a lot of work to be done ... it's all dirt and concrete. The first thing I noticed were torch welders hanging from the ceiling, securing the steel for the second floor. Unless you've been through this before, it’s hard to believe this will be a fully functioning restaurant within six months.
It's much harder going into an existing space, somebody else's restaurant that needed to be gutted, than it is to build a new restaurant from the ground up.There are many hidden surprises along the way. When you start from scratch, you don't have those headaches— columns and stairwells that can't be moved, big electrical junction boxes, bathroom plumbing that it's too costly to relocate—you're constantly working around that.
Walking through mountains of dirt and earth and concrete bare walls with piles of debris everywhere, it could be overwhelming. Since this is my 10th opening, and our second steakhouse, with a very seasoned team and architects
and contractors we've used in the past, I feel more assured that this is where we're supposed to be, even though it pushes our opening date of mid-July into early fall.
In the next couple of weeks we should see plumbing lines and electrical conduits running through the space. We're finalizing the kitchen drawings for submission to the village, and in the next couple of weeks should be able to finalize the drawings. It's a 12,000-square-foot space with 300 seats, so there's a lot of kitchen going on. The biggest difference we will see in comparing Schaumburg to Wheeling’s Tramonto Steak & Seafood will be the prep areas. They are larger in Schaumburg to accommodate the private dining upstairs. Also the walk-in capacity, which is going to be an addition to the building, will give us more room to age meats on premise and accommodate the larger RT Lounge.
Next I went off to check on the Rosemont location ...
Walking into the Rosemont Osteria site with my Osteria chef team—it's a full hard-hat environment. It's amazing how fast they've built a 600-bedroom InterContinental Hotel from the ground up since the last time I was here for groundbreaking (when we did a photo shoot 12 months ago).
The construction team out here is way ahead of schedule, which is great for us. We have a September opening date scheduled and will be able to take possession in August. Our 12,000 square feet of space has the vision of a restaurant: the dry wall is up, you can identify the vaulted ceilings, you can recognize our wine tower, the private dining rooms are segregated along with the bar, the kitchen hoods are installed, the floor is started and other equipment is coming in the next couple of weeks. The biggest delay is our huge wood-burning oven, which is being trucked in from just outside of Seattle. They have to get the oven in before they can close up certain sections of the walls since they use a fork-lift to set it into place.
The feeling is so different from Schaumburg, where a couple dozen construction guys are building a restaurant. In Rosemont there are hundreds of guys building a hotel from the ground up, much more like our experience building the Wheeling restaurants at the Westin hotel. There are so many more trucks and guys everywhere, it creates an amazing energy and excitement.
Unlike Schaumburg, there are no more drawings/blueprints to deal with, as they were done months ago. The menus are done—we're really waiting for the massive construction to be complete so we can get in there and start cooking. My Osteria Rosemont chef starts this week, training with our team in Wheeling, and we start to do a lot of tastings for the Sous Chef team the following week.
The menus in Rosemont will be similar to Wheeling, but there will be a larger emphasis on wood-grill cooking, which we do not have in Wheeling. I can tell that these two back-to-back openings—the Steakhouse and the Osteria—will be slightly more challenging than the Wheeling openings, which were both under the same roof. And traveling between locations and downtown to Tru will be heightened with all of the summer construction ...
Site Visits: A Tale of Two Cities
April 29, 2008
 |
| Future site of Tramonto Steak & Seafood in Schaumburg, Ill. |
It's much harder going into an existing space, somebody else's restaurant that needed to be gutted, than it is to build a new restaurant from the ground up.There are many hidden surprises along the way. When you start from scratch, you don't have those headaches— columns and stairwells that can't be moved, big electrical junction boxes, bathroom plumbing that it's too costly to relocate—you're constantly working around that.
Walking through mountains of dirt and earth and concrete bare walls with piles of debris everywhere, it could be overwhelming. Since this is my 10th opening, and our second steakhouse, with a very seasoned team and architects
 |
| Future site of Osteria di Tramonto in Rosemont, Ill. |
In the next couple of weeks we should see plumbing lines and electrical conduits running through the space. We're finalizing the kitchen drawings for submission to the village, and in the next couple of weeks should be able to finalize the drawings. It's a 12,000-square-foot space with 300 seats, so there's a lot of kitchen going on. The biggest difference we will see in comparing Schaumburg to Wheeling’s Tramonto Steak & Seafood will be the prep areas. They are larger in Schaumburg to accommodate the private dining upstairs. Also the walk-in capacity, which is going to be an addition to the building, will give us more room to age meats on premise and accommodate the larger RT Lounge.
Next I went off to check on the Rosemont location ...
Walking into the Rosemont Osteria site with my Osteria chef team—it's a full hard-hat environment. It's amazing how fast they've built a 600-bedroom InterContinental Hotel from the ground up since the last time I was here for groundbreaking (when we did a photo shoot 12 months ago).
The construction team out here is way ahead of schedule, which is great for us. We have a September opening date scheduled and will be able to take possession in August. Our 12,000 square feet of space has the vision of a restaurant: the dry wall is up, you can identify the vaulted ceilings, you can recognize our wine tower, the private dining rooms are segregated along with the bar, the kitchen hoods are installed, the floor is started and other equipment is coming in the next couple of weeks. The biggest delay is our huge wood-burning oven, which is being trucked in from just outside of Seattle. They have to get the oven in before they can close up certain sections of the walls since they use a fork-lift to set it into place.
The feeling is so different from Schaumburg, where a couple dozen construction guys are building a restaurant. In Rosemont there are hundreds of guys building a hotel from the ground up, much more like our experience building the Wheeling restaurants at the Westin hotel. There are so many more trucks and guys everywhere, it creates an amazing energy and excitement.
Unlike Schaumburg, there are no more drawings/blueprints to deal with, as they were done months ago. The menus are done—we're really waiting for the massive construction to be complete so we can get in there and start cooking. My Osteria Rosemont chef starts this week, training with our team in Wheeling, and we start to do a lot of tastings for the Sous Chef team the following week.
The menus in Rosemont will be similar to Wheeling, but there will be a larger emphasis on wood-grill cooking, which we do not have in Wheeling. I can tell that these two back-to-back openings—the Steakhouse and the Osteria—will be slightly more challenging than the Wheeling openings, which were both under the same roof. And traveling between locations and downtown to Tru will be heightened with all of the summer construction ...
Posted by Rick Tramonto on April 29, 2008 | Comments (0)
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