Tuesday night at 384 McNabb.
John Perri, owner of Chicago Cookshop, is working the grill.
His tournant Erik Nowak, the quite-extraordinary former Panna owner, is working pans.
Perri looks up at Nowak.
"Well, it was fun working with you," he says.
Nowak has no idea what this is about.
"He was looking at me like I was firing him or something," Perri says.
"This is our last meal we're cooking together," he tells Nowak.
Nowak is still not getting it.
"Where are you going?" he asks the boss.
"I'm not going anywhere," Perri responds. "We're done."
Nowak was the first of 45 staffers at Chicago Cookshop to learn they had worked their last shift.
Perri had learned at 3 o'clock the previous afternoon that his liquor licence had been pulled by a third party who held it.
Since then, he'd been frantically working through scenarios to save the place.
As a first-time applicant for a liquor licence, Perri says he was many months away from getting his own licence.
His parents and others urged him to keep the place open for a while without liquor.
No cigar.
"It's too big to survive without alcohol," Perri said. "I never in my life thought I would have shut down a restaurant while it was running full steam."
After closing Tuesday, Perri gathered the six or seven staffers on duty and broke the news.
384 McNabb Street, the place that gobbled up Aurora’s, Amici’s and Casa Mia, had claimed a new victim.
The Cookshop was now history.
Sure, Perri had heard the rumours about 384 McNabb.
He'd been around the Sault restaurant scene since, as a kid, his dad built a wooden box so he could reach up to the pizza ovens and make his own pies.
He heard everything.
"Everyone told me that place was cursed," Perri tells SooToday.
"When I started it. Everybody thought I was nuts. My parents thought I was nuts. My suppliers thought I was nuts. My beer guys. My liquor guys. Every other restaurant owner in town thought I was nuts."
"I went in there and I proved the point. That building wasn't cursed. That building can survive. That building can thrive. That makes me proud."
Perri and business partner Aaron Gridzak thought they had it all figured out.
They'd create yet another Sault Italian restaurant, but their's would serve steaks.
Everything, including the pasta and bread, would be homemade. Nothing would be frozen.
They'd cut the utility bill by replacing the 650 light bulbs inside the building with LED high-efficiency bulbs.
They'd remove half the bulbs on the building's exterior.
Most importantly, they'd never, ever use the 80-pizza rotisserie oven they found in the kitchen.
“I’ll never turn that thing on," Perri told SooToday when Chicago Cookshop opened its doors in late November. "It was turned on to make bruschetta bread and six pizzas a night. It was costing them somewhere between $5,000 and $7,000 a month to run the pizza oven. Little things like that are going to destroy you.”
And, by all accounts, things were cooking up quite nicely at Chicago Cookshop.
"We were rocking," Perri says of the initial weeks last December.
Six hundred, seven hundred customers a day.
Few complaints. No meals sent back to the kitchen.
By last month, things had predictably slowed to 180 to 250 covers a day.
And Perri was ready with a Phase 2 plan.
He'd open for lunch, and weekend brunch.
He was preparing to introduce a new menu this week.
"It's not a failure. I didn't fail. It wasn't in the red....I was just getting up and running."
"I'm proud of what we did. I'm proud of what we accomplished," he says. "I chalk it up to a life experience. I chalk it up to one of my goals achieved. I didn't want it to end like this. But sometimes fate isn't decided by you."
So what decided the fate of Chicago Cookshop?
Why on earth was something as critically important as a liquor licence held by a third party who could back out at any time.
Apparently, it's a common practice.
As Perri explains it (pretty much everything in this article is sole-sourced from John Perri, his side only of complicated business relationships), it takes many, many months for an entrepreneur to get a first liquor licence approved by the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario.
"It's a whole background check. It's a huge scenario. You've got to give all your records from the previous five to 10 years. They want to know everything about you. It's a big process. A lengthy process."
But a licence held by an establishment's previous owner remains valid until it expires, even if the doors close.
And the old licence can be transferred and contracted out to a new business owner.
So the previous owner allows you to run off the old licence, until a new liquor licence is approved.
In the case of Chicago Cookshop, the short version of the story is that the previous licence holder allowed Perri to operate off his licence for four months, then lost patience.
Last week, the old licence was forfeited, said Perri.
Perri figures it might have taken him six months to a year to get his own liquor licence.
"Now, I'm back to square one," he says. "New application. New file."
"I put everything I had into that place. I'm done."
For Perri, the worst thing is that 45 people lost their jobs without notice.
"I owe so much gratitude to my staff. They did an outstanding job. My kitchen staff - a bunch of rock stars!"
"I couldn't even say you've got two weeks," he says.
"I'm mad at the fact that I couldn't give my employees more notice than them showing up to work the next day and the doors are closed. They have families to feed. They have bills, rent. They depended on me to give them a job. I couldn't even give them a week's notice. I had people who quit their jobs to come work for me."
His partner, Aaron Gridzak, for example.
"I convinced him to go into that place. He got married. He's got a kid on the way. Bought a house. He's unemployed. I feel bad because I talked him into this. I talked to him for six months to convince him."
As for Perri, he has options.
He can return to his family's business, The Harp Bar and Grill, hardly a stone's throw from the Cookshop.
Or he can use his commercial helicopter pilot's licence.
Even though Chicago Cookshop was operating in the black, Perri says the sudden, unexpected closure may force him into bankruptcy.
"In a new business that size, it's a day-to-day operation. We've been in the black, but teetering in the black. We had to spend money here, money there. It goes out faster than it goes in. Before you start seeing money in a restaurant, you're looking at three to five years. We were doing well. We were doing really well."
"I had a truck show up to drop off food yesterday. I found out at three o'clock in the afternoon on Monday that by 11 in the morning the next day, I'm done. I had to call my food suppliers and say: 'hey listen, these trucks can't come.' I had $40,000 worth of food. It's in here [The Harp] now."
"First and foremost, my employees are getting paid. After that, I've got to talk with my suppliers now because I still have to pay for the stock. I'm on a three-week credit thing with them. I have enough stock for three weeks. Now that I'm not selling it, I still have to pay for it. They're not going to take stuff back. I'm probably going to have to claim bankruptcy."
Is there really a Curse of 384 McNabb?
One moment, Perri insists there's no such thing.
Later, he's not so sure.
"The moment I opened the doors, my life went to hell," he says.
"I don't know, I don't know."
(PHOTO: Restaurant owner John Perri, right, and his business partner Aaron Gridzak are pictured at the opening of Chicago Cookshop in this November, 2014 file photo. David Helwig for SooToday)
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