Take a good look at this photo. This ruin used to be a successful restaurant in a historic part in the wonderful city of Lviv. There are two reasons it was pulled down, as far as I can see: The city mayor wanted to show who’s the boss, and/or someone wanting to take over the business.
I’m not impartial here – this is a story of my friends and my beloved restaurant industry (I used to own a bar). But it once again demonstrates how the system can crush even the most creative, the most adventurous businesses – the kind it should cherish and support.
The restaurant used to be called The First Grill Restaurant of Meat and Justice, and was designed after the Lviv executioner’s former residence.
I hated the concept, but love the owners, a trio of young and ambitious businessmen, all in their early 30s, who in 2007 started a highly successful and creative chain of restaurants called !Fest. Their startup operation was Kryivka, a not-so-secret bar just off the central Ploshcha Rynok designed as a hidden bunker of the UPA, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
The First Grill Restaurant was in fact their 12th establishment, opened last summer in the yard of the former Bernardine monastery that dates back to the 17th century.
To open it, the owners had spent $300,000 on a 100-square-meter site, which had been for sale for some time. The site was not cheap, and the work that would turn it into a functioning business was both complicated and delicate. It was an architectural challenge because the site is on the national heritage list. It was expensive to upgrade for all of those reasons.
!Fest rented more space from the city for a summer terrace, drafted a concept that the city approved and then invested close to $200,000 into building a full-scale restaurant, complete with a cool play area for children, an automated open fire grill that they invented themselves, and a number of attractions for the young and old to make a show out of every visit.
The restaurant had problems before it even opened: Representatives of the nationalist Svoboda party, which has a majority in the city council, tried to stop construction a number of times, citing lack of permits required to build on a historic site. Eventually the argument seemed to be settled.
Yet saying a restaurant has no permits in Ukraine is like saying the sky is blue. The regulations in this business are intentionally designed and preserved to make sure it’s just about impossible to get all the paperwork right. And to get close to getting it right takes roughly two years.
!Fest makes good use of existing laws, though. Their lawyer is one of the few I know in this industry who actually uses the provision of declarative principle of running a business. This means that if you apply for a permit of a sort and your documents are accepted by the relevant authority, you can consider yourself having the permit from that moment on.
Yet none of it helped the restaurant. The restaurant’s opening was accompanied by pickets, the owners were accused of damaging the historic site, and the mayor promised that the restaurant would be gone, one of the partners of !Fest said.
This was not the first restaurant to get in trouble: At one point they discovered that the city sold a land plot underneath one of their creations, a cafe in an old tram car, to someone who had nothing to do with their business.
As all these troubles were happening to the grill restaurant, someone approached the owners and offered to buy the troublesome business. The catch was that they offered a fraction of the cost that had been invested into the business. The owners declined and were sued by the mayor, and, of course, lost a number of cases. “Imagine what it’s like going to court against the government,” one of the partners said. I can’t.
On Nov. 6, the court’s decision was executed and everything was pulled down that used to be the outside part of the restaurant on the rented territory. Only the kitchen – which was built in the privately owned part of the site – remained.
The mayor’s office said the restaurant was built illegally, as it had a permanent structure. But !Fest dismissed the claims as nonsensical. “The roof was made out of plastic sheets, and the support structure was designed so that it did not even touch the ancient walls,” says Yuriy Nazaruk, the creative director of !Fest.
The company came out with a statement accusing the Lviv mayor of a raider attack on their business and promised to sue him all the way up to the European courts, as well as start a massive information campaign about the reality of doing business in Lviv.
In the meantime, the partners are expecting a visitor offering them a token price for what was once their flourishing business.
Kyiv Post editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at [email protected]
