After I’d finished our lengthy business plan complete with financial modeling as detailed as your typical million dollar merger, I thought the lengthiest part of the start-up was over. Soon I discovered, as most entrepreneurs during their first start-up often do, I was wrong. When I tell people that I’m starting a business in this economic climate, they assume that the most difficult part of the process is obtaining financing. Not true. Financing is fairly clear cut: you meet with every banker in the city that will actually answer your phone calls, give it your best shot and maybe two or three will tell you there is hope. It’s quite simple. Far more complicated, is deciding where you want to put your business.
The website survey and an ongoing e-mail dialog made it very clear where clients would like to see this business go: the Galleria, Katy, Sugarland, Clear Lake, the Woodlands…you get the point. So it was obvious that we need to keep it centrally located with easy highway access. Maybe we can’t be in Katy and Sugarland at the same time, but we can most certainly be accessible from those places. This narrowed things down a great deal as inner-loop real estate is far harder to come by and most of it lay far outside our budget.
My inbox was already flooded with brochures for defunct restaurants just off 59 South, up 290 or 288. I saw enough of these to realize that these suburban sites would not only isolate many clients, but that they were not usually the safest for after-hours work and would never allow the urban café and cooking classes to work.
More importantly, there is one crucial problem that prevents converting existing restaurant infrastructure into a kitchen incubator: restaurants have dining rooms; expansive and expensive dining rooms, especially in lower-end restaurants where the kitchen size is kept to an efficient minimum. What could be done with this extra space? Were there any landlords in all of Houston that would entertain splitting these restaurants?
After putting about 500 miles on my motorcycle running back and forth across the City (and putting reviews of each site into a handy spreadsheet database, might I add) I finally found a broker that specialized in urban development. I found my real estate guardian angel. Strangely enough, I only found him because I saw sign for his company at a site they were leasing while stuck in traffic on Westheimer. When I got home I Googled the company and quickly sent off an inquiry about the site explaining my concept. He called me no less than 10 minutes later.
“Are you for real?” he asked. “We’ve been trying to get someone to do this type of thing in Houston for years!”
The first sites we visited were all in downtown, an area I had never entertained as a possibility. I mean, traffic and parking problems and bars, oh my!! I also figured it would be too expensive. We visited a site on Navigation in the warehouse district – an industrial meets urban chic haven for food businesses. The thought of sharing a building with Trentino Gelato and Mallie’s Desserts filled me with both joy and thoughts of a future fat self. There was only one problem – the site was a shell space. Though this allowed for greater flexibility, it meant that even after we signed a lease, it would take months to build out the basic infrastructure, bring in all of the equipment and finish out the space before we could be open for business.
Seeing as how we have kept you all waiting over a year for this business to open, this didn’t seem like a good idea.
Fortunately, we also visited another site on the fringes of downtown’s historic district that, beyond the typical restaurant infrastructure, contained a very special, shiny and wonderful thing: an unusually massive hood. The hood system shone through the site’s overall hideous decoration and design flaws as a stainless steel beacon of hope. This restaurant was unusual in that it operated two kitchens – a back of the house cooking station and a front of the house “open” kitchen. More importantly, both hood lines were visible from the sidewalk, separated by only a small dining area that left just the right amount of space for a café. The idea for the Café at KitchenInc was born.
The site unfolded beautifully – metered parking out front was hardly used, there were two cheap contract lots across the street, a commercial loading zone on the corner, easy access to 45, a 24/hr concierge just next door… beautiful! Only one crushing problem loomed over the future Kitchen Incubator headquarters: there was that blasted dining room again! All 2,500 square feet of it!

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