Permits!

We achieved a major milestone this week when our building permits were approved by the SF Department of Building Inspection (DBI). Unfortunately, this city agency has a terrible reputation among contractors, business owners, architects, homeowners and anyone else who has ever tried to apply for a permit for building or zoning... We entered into this process with trepidation, as many other restauranteurs have described it as a hellish experience.

Considering all the negative hype, the process was really not that terrible. It did take nearly 16 hours of patient and anxious waiting as the inspectors meticulously poured over our plans looking for anything amiss to mark up and edit, but in the end we left their office full of excitement and feeling very accomplished (and much less rich-- total permitting fees: $33,500!). I can empathize with DBI inspectors because people go in there with their plans that may represent lifelong dreams, extraordinary expense, and years of planning, only to be told by DBI that their project is impossible due to Building Code Chapter 10 Section 109.35.c Paragraph 2.... After all, their job is to make sure your plans comply with the Code, not to make sure your project gets built. It is easy to blame the inspectors and the City for slowing down or discouraging development and progress but, in truth, without a carefully written and policed set of Code, many poorly conceived or unsafe projects would surely get built.

Approved (or, "stamped") permits are a major milestone because it means that construction can begin and many many months of ideation, conceptualization, sketching, planning, architectural drawings, fundraising, networking, coordinating, legal negotiations, etc are ready to become a tangible, three-dimensional THING that you can actually see, touch (and eventually taste and smell, in our case!). In short, it is one of the last major hurdles to get over before our dream becomes a reality. Of course there is still a huge amount of work to do and many potential pitfalls to avoid, but we feel we have already accomplished a great deal by obtaining the permits. As our architect quipped, "Congratulations! We have permits... now the real work begins!"