The financial and bureaucratic odyssey of opening a new restaurant, which starts with at least 400,000 euros.

BarcelonaOpening a new restaurant requires a minimum investment of €400,000 for a space of about one hundred square meters in Barcelona's Eixample district. This figure can quickly increase, depending on the luxury you want to put into the restaurant (type of wood, lighting, furniture in general) and also depending on whether the work on the space needs to start from scratch or not. However, having the money isn't the most important thing for a successful start, because there are many other obstacles, not always financial, that can make the opening take from three months to a year. Among the difficulties are bureaucracy, municipal permits that don't arrive quickly; the dining room and kitchen equipment, which in today's hospitality industry is one of the biggest headaches, and also getting manufacturers to commit to completion dates for the construction. But many more obstacles can be added, such as the possibility of soundproofing the restaurant, which may be an unforeseen event that hadn't been taken into account. Thus, opening a restaurant is an odyssey that has a distant Ithaca: ensuring the restaurant is full of diners.

In Barcelona the chef Carlos Pérez de Rozas has just opened the Pompa restaurant (c. Séneca, 25). "I have a fabulous team that has been working together for a while, it's stable, and since we have a well-coordinated schedule at Berbena, we decided to stay in another nearby location," says Carles Pérez de Rozas one morning as suppliers arrive one after another to bring him fresh vegetables and fish. The fact is that a neighbor mentioned to the chef that there was a disused space on the ground floor of the building. "I liked the idea of having the two locations very close together; it was an opportunity," says Pérez de Rozas, who adds that chef-owners who dig deep into their pockets to carry out renovations in city premises are also keeping Barcelona in a difficult situation. "In one city, there is a listed heritage site and another that isn't, but that needs renovation to keep the city in good condition. We invest out of our own pockets to do it," he comments.

The chef's idea was to pay the rent for the premises, as he also does with the Berbena, take out a bank loan to renovate it, and thus cover the cost of the work. When everything was coming to an end, he had to start all over again by soundproofing the restaurant. "The solution was to cover the Catalan vault, which we had saved with the work; we covered it with a false ceiling, painted white, but we're not finished yet because we still need to resolve the reverberation that creates the noise inside the premises," he says. All this has brought unforeseen events, including "flooding caused by the old sewer from the building's owners' association," which he had to cover himself, explains the chef. As he finishes recounting this, he takes a call from a reservation. They ask him if he'll be able to sing. Happy Birthday to a person who will go to dinner at the restaurant at dusk to celebrate his birthday. "Yes, I sing Happy Birthday "From the bar, while I cook, and whatever it takes, because I understand that people come to celebrate life, that it's a special moment, and I like it that way. Yesterday, I had a couple celebrating 29 years of marriage at Pompa."

And all that effort for a restaurant, Pompa, which has capacity for twenty diners and a creative menu, in which there are no croquettes, carpaccio or steak tartare, but also dishes such as corn crisps, polenta pim-pam ("the traditional polenta, served like an ingot"), tarama and trout phases ("mousse of hake eggs and endives") and grilled duck hearts. "The latter is a fusion of a dish from the Suru restaurant, who makes chicken hearts. I make duck, which has less guts." Of course, the dish provokes a reaction among diners: "Some eat with apprehension; others, with amusement, because they believe that going out means trying new dishes."

One hundred thousand euros just for the license

For its part, the chef Miquel Pardo, from the restaurant Cruix (c. Entença, 57), explains that it took him up to five years to find a new location in Barcelona—in fact, he was looking for one larger than his current location. Over the years, he's encountered all kinds of situations, especially when the prices agreed upon when signing the contract were changed. "Luckily, my father is a tax advisor and he's always helped me with the paperwork so that when it came time to sign, they wouldn't try to trick me, as they almost did once," says Miquel Pardo. The situation he describes relates to a 150-square-meter space he found that met the requirements he was looking for: a large kitchen to make rice dishes, his specialty as a chef born in Castellón. "Everything was going well until we read in the contract that I had to pay a restaurant license of 100,000 euros and that they were only granting it to me temporarily, because they would keep everything, and then they would make me pay monthly rent," says Pardo, who explains that when opening restaurants, this is a more common practice than we might imagine. To that license fee, which he paid and which the small print stated was not in his name, had to be added "the cost of the works, the cost of the furniture, the taxes, the monthly rent, and, after people came to eat, the restaurant had to be profitable with 43-euro menus," says Miquel Pardo. He didn't sign the document because they knew how to interpret "the scam" they were about to fall victim to. Finally, the chef-owner has found a new location on Mallorca Street, which he had previously occupied. El Tros Restaurant - Wine Bar"I found this space in April, and we're currently undergoing renovations, which are taking a long time because of the process. I estimate we'll finish in October and be able to open by the end of the year," the chef says.

On Londres Street in Barcelona, Chef Víctor Ròdenas, along with his friends Ignasi Garcia and Xavier Moragas, has just opened the restaurant Casa Fiero. Encouraged by the success of their first restaurant, Maleducat (c. Manso, 54), which seats fifty people, they considered opening a second, larger restaurant with more capacity. After some time looking for a space, they found one on Calle Londres. "And the first thing you encounter is that you have to pay a transfer fee, which ends up being lost money, which isn't a future investment for the establishment. You pay the transfer fee, and then the other expenses begin to make the restaurant a reality," says Ròdenas, who emphasizes that for a location in the Eixample that costs around 0,000 euros, this is a very minimal total amount. "Then there's also the waiting time, because the construction work can be extended for a thousand and one reasons." At Casa Fiero, they started in February, but they didn't hold the official opening until September, after a few summer months in which they encountered unforeseen problems: from the power of the premises' electricity to the reverberation of noise, a situation that they only have to fix with some damping panels on the ceiling.

Finally, Leo Chechelnitzky, owner of the Malparit restaurant (c. Córcega, 253), states that renovating and opening the establishment cost him €800,000. "It's a 230-square-meter space that was fifty years old, and therefore needed to update its licenses and adapt it to current regulations, such as the construction of restrooms for people with reduced mobility or updating it to safety regulations." And as a final example of all this, Leo Chechelnitzky points out that in Barcelona each square meter of renovation costs €3,000. Opening a new, high-end restaurant, then, is a financial and bureaucratic odyssey, but it's all part of opening: then the real life begins, which means cooking and filling the room.