Our Reception Desk!

We’ve hired our opening team of dinner servers (who will greet guests from the lovely new reception desk pictured here, which was built & photographed by Ry); two bright, thoughtful, and passionate people  with whom we are thrilled to work. One makes films, plays drums, and makes — or so we hear– a mean grilled cheese sandwich. The other takes photographs, reads faster than superman can fly, and bakes like a fiend. We’ve also hired our third cook, a recovering software programmer (he likes hydrocolloids better than code now, we’re lucky to have him!) who’s also moonlighted as a woodworker and musician in the last few years. All of them have been superheroes, working hard on site and engaging with our dreams for Journeyman fully. Most of our non-construction time in the last few weeks has focused on getting ourselves and our employees trained and prepared for opening, when we welcome our first diners and cook our first dinners.

Together, we’ve spent time discussing our menu design, our food sources, our beverage philosophy, the theories of social interaction and community that shape our service model, and the details of legal policy and safety regulations. We’ve also spent time eating out at fine dining establishments, tasting wine and beer, sipping our way through the tea & coffee list, playing with food science, and practicing details of hospitality like carrying plates and pouring drinks.

The team training has been a satisfying process, full of good tastes and good people, and it’s reminded us that opening a restaurant isn’t all tile grout, paperwork, and painter’s tape. Opening a restaurant is still certainly about the administrative details, the location and design, and the comestibles and service, but it’s also about creating a home-away-from-home for guests and staff both. Especially as we creep ever closer to opening our door to the public, we realize that we are forging a place that will hopefully serve joy and contentment along with the meals.

A detail of the salvaged piano soundboard in our desk

Window, as seen through kitchen window

Pictures of the window, because you asked. Sorry for the lack of photos lately – Johanna and Ry haven’t been in for a bit, and we didn’t want to sear your eyes shut with our own amateurish attempts. All these are from Johanna.

The window is a little over 10′ high by 12′ wide, with 60 panes, with 5 different types of glass put in over the years. Putting in all the missing panes isn’t difficult, but entertainingly smudgy.

Schmutz!

It literally got too hot to work yesterday – it wasn’t even an issue of discomfort (though it wasn’t exactly pleasant) – we literally couldn’t get anything done because tileset wouldn’t dry and caulk got too soft to manipulate. Back to work today.

Ceiling patching
Tiling
Basic and advanced troweling
Paint rollering
Ladder wrangling
Obsessive wall sanding
Tile cutting
Piano moving
Graduate level putty removal (did you know they used to mix cement into the stuff?)
Window glazing
Grouting
Cement removal
Pressure washing and degreasing
Not cursing even when you want to very much

Sorry for the lack of posts – we’ve been doing a lot of the construction, and the days are long and exhausting. Getting there, though.

Also, we got permission to hang our shingle, so that’s getting forged right now.

Somerville sky - more gorgeous than sky elsewhere

It’s hard to believe how much has happened in the last week, and how much is coming together all of a sudden.

Two days after clearing several hundred gallons of water out of the building, we flew to Riga to get the visas needed to make this project happen. Visas were gotten, we got back on Tuesday, and have not stopped for breath since.

Equipment is coming, walls are up, there’s another city hearing (for permission to hang a shingle) on Thursday, and there are a million shipments and purchases to keep track of – fabric, placemats, sheet pans, library ladders, black pipe, cabinets, clamps, paint, dish racks, etc.etc.etc.

We’re well into finish work now, and had a horde of wonderful volunteers in the space yesterday, painting, re-glazing the window, sanding, and otherwise doing all kinds of things that need to be done and can be done by just about anyone. The market was going, it was a beautiful day, and people kept stopping by our open door to wish us well. To all of you who said hi, thanks for taking the time to do so – we can’t wait to feed you.

Whisper it softly, but opening is in sight.

Doesn't that look nice and solid?

The photos (by Johanna Bobrow), have nothing to do with the restaurant, except that they were shot from the nearby junction of Washington and Somerville Ave, and are beautiful. I think they capture our present mood rather well.

That said, it seems like everyone in Union got flooded out – Sherman and Metro Ped were vacuuming water out of their basements too – and then came over to help us!

A huge, huge thank you to everyone who spent some part of Sunday evening helping dry out the restaurant and our neighbor’s spaces – especially Wenzday and the MetroPed crew.

That said, no lasting damage was done – the best time for a restaurant to get flooded is before it’s actually built. The roofers came to patch our roof on Monday, and work stopped to let things dry out a bit till Wednesday. Sheetrock is up, so we have walls now, and they’re getting plastered over the weekend.

Just in time for us to find out that the window might not be quite as solid as we thought.

Shadows and lights

This is the window from the inside (Johanna again – like we said, she likes light).

1. We’re hiring. There’s now a page with a job description – we hope you’ll take a look and see if you’d like to join us. We have absolute faith in what we’re doing, and we know that getting Journeyman off the ground will be an incredible experience to be part of.

2. The second Boston Globe article is up!

We had a little problem with giant sandworms

We’ve hit a phase where construction rolls quickly and there’s a lot happening with relatively little interference from us. HVAC is complete. Hot water heaters got plumbed in, wires are now snaking through studs everywhere, the lighting plan is more or less done, though we need to find specific fixtures. You can even see where the sinks go in the bathrooms.

A lot of paperwork is getting done – we applied for permission to hang our shingle, and got certified on CPR (really anti-choking procedures) and food safety, and then we need to actually go pick up our liquor license…

And of course equipment is all starting to come together. Piles of boxes of pitchers and our ice buckets at home, along with various huge boxes getting shipped in left and right – mixer, coffee grinder, soon induction burners… and we’re putting in the tabletop order on Friday.

It definitely feels like we’re done with the wrecking, and are really into the building of something new.

The photos are by Johanna Bobrow again, by the way. She likes shooting rubble, light, and graveyards.

Sandworms also perform aerial acrobatics

He has nothing to do with construction

On every construction project, there comes a point where the design team starts to have to scramble to keep feeding the construction team enough information for them to continue working uninterrupted.

We hit that point today, and fortunately, we have enough going that Ben and Nick can keep going for another day or two – not counting the time they’ll spend getting inspections done.

We also discovered that due to having to move various other things around, the kitchen wound up being framed almost 2′ narrower than we intended. We had wiggle room, so it’s not the end of the world, but we won’t be driving Hummers through it anytime soon.

Also, the draft of the second Boston Globe piece went in yesterday, so look out for it in the next couple of weeks. We talk about how much air conditioning costs.

Most of Monday was spent sorting that out.

But, knock on wood, we seem to have started to turn the corner on a few fronts – table design is firmed up and we’re ready to head into fabrication, we hired a cook, re-measured the entire space so we have drawings of it as-framed, and now we start on the finish work.

Also, NStar came and had a look at our power supply issues.

First rough inspection is due this week.

Like a cave.

Construction this week has gone pretty quickly. We’ve completed just about every wall that will exist in the space – the last one is getting framed today. In effect, you can now see then entire volume of the restaurant outlined in studwall. We kind of like it this way – it’s a connect the dots kind of thing, inviting you to fill the shapes in in your mind’s eye.

The plumbers have filled the walls with drains and copper supply pipes, really kind of pretty if you think of them as accents to all the framing studs. Plumbing is getting to the stage where we start to think about exactly how to hook up each piece of equipment, which of course is dictating that we rework some of the connections that are in place, but so it goes.

The airspace is a little clearer now that the electricians have come through once – a lot of hanging conduit just gone – but still a lot of chains (for fluorescent light panels) and wires (for the drop ceiling frame) hang from the ceiling, looking a little macabre.

And the HVAC team has started to build the giant spiral duct for the air. We could probably both squeeze into the tube at the same time. It’s really rather impressive.

We ran some hiccups this week – a bathroom with not quite the right dimensions, electrical supply proving to be a headache, necessary travel creating scheduling problems. Up and on.

Photo by Mr. Strohm-Herman. All construction photos for the last few posts, though we forgot to mention it at the time, were either by him or another polymath friend, Johanna Bobrow. Proper credits are up now. We’ve not been shooting the construction ourselves, because we tend to be too busy poking at things or talking to Ben & Nick when we’re onsite, so we’re very grateful to them for helping us document this process!