Week Twenty-Four: Zahav has liftoff
As of the afternoon of May 1, Zahav is fully permitted with the city, and the liquor license is in hand. The restaurant will open the evening of Monday, May 5.
To call this last step in the process a Herculean feat is entirely, 100-percent accurate.
To explain:
Zahav will be the third restaurant opening for Steve Cook, after Marigold in West Philly and Xochitl in Society Hill. Cook knows the drill.
In the beginning -- sorry to get all biblical -- a restaurateur brings his plans to the city Health Department for review, and submits a check. In Zahav's case, the check was $815. The city came back with demands for a partition between hand sinks and a garbage disposal installed in a different sink.
Construction proceeded. The city inspected the electrical and plumbing work along the way. The city demanded a separate exhaust hood when inspectors realized that a separate grill was being added. The fire system was inspected last.
Last Friday (4/25), the city health inspector finished the final inspection, and the restaurant passed. Zahav got the certificate.
Cook wanted to go to the Municipal Services Building to swap the certificate for a food license, but it was found that the liquor license had unpaid city taxes. This started wrangling among Zahav attorney Barry Goldstein, the seller of the license and the city Law Department.
The matter was resolved Tuesday morning, and Cook went to the Law Department at 1515 Arch St. to obtain a tax-clearance letter to prove it. Letter in his briefcase, Cook walked briskly to the Municipal Services Building and obtained numbers to wait in two lines: One, with the Revenue Department to get his tax ID number, and another at Licenses and Inspections to get his business-privilege license and the food license.
Cook waited nearly an hour in the Revenue line. The transaction went smoothly; a kind clerk told him in five minutes that he could use the same tax number as Xochitl's. Back in the lobby, he wanted nearly three hours for a clerk at L&I to tell him that L&I had no idea where Zahav was.
Huh?
Apparently, there's a disconnection between Health and L&I. The Health Department had visited the previous restaurants in Zahav's space many times over the years. L&I had no idea what the address "237 St. James Place" meant. How could L&I issue a license to something that didn't exist?
Cook was sent away.
On his way back to Zahav -- and remember, this is less than a week from the projected opening -- his cell rang. It was Andrew Eisenstein, a real estate developer friend and Penn classmate, who owns Xochitl's building. Eisenstein heard Cook's story and called a friend who's an attorney, well-versed in zoning matters. They conferenced. The attorney told Cook, "Fax me everything you have."
Twenty-hour hours later, the matter was resolved.
Cook won't disclose the legal bill. "I won't even look at it," he said. "I don't want to kill the buzz. It would pale in comparison to what we would lose from not being open."
I started by calling the effort Herculean. The lawyer who took the case: Hercules Grigos of Obermayer Rebmann Maxwell & Hippel.
Zahav had two nights of "friends-and-family" test dinners over the weekend.