a last look at Feast without a certificate of occupancy
the Big Moment
boy, did we earn this slip of paper
Well, it’s happened. Yesterday, John Berg, Venture West’s project manager, went downtown and came back with our certificate of occupancy. Not that we’re out of the woods yet, but it’s a very big milestone in my very small world. We do have a few hiccups: the fire inspector “red-tagged two pieces of equipment for not being under our exhaust hood- you remember, our incredibly expensive exhaust hood? We have a steamer and a convection oven which don’t sit under it. How the mechanical engineer didn’t know they required a hood, I’m not sure. How two pieces of equipment that weigh probably fifteen hundred pounds went unnoticed throughout the plan check is beyond me. How one fire inspector could say they’re fine and another could say absolutely not, you have to shut off the gas and power to this stuff immediately or we’ll shut you down, well, I’ve become acutely and painfully aware that two inspectors could look at the exact same building and have reports that are exactly opposite one another. Inspectors are like snowflakes. Or restaurants’ versions of a Caesar salad. Or my fluctuating tolerance level for all of this. So I hate to cast a shadow over this momentous event, but unfortunately Dino the fire inspector, who is clearly more a letter-of-the-law guy as opposed to a spirit-of-the-law guy, is not my favorite snowflake right now.