Zina Murray was, as she put it later, “verklempt.”
Since Logan Square Kitchen opened just over a year ago, the kitchen has attracted a handful of regular clients, mostly pastry chefs and confectioners. The events space has been home to weddings and a pastry market, and this past spring, before she opened Girl and the Goat, Top Chef winner Stephanie Izard teamed up with Boka’s Giuseppe Tentori and Rick Gresh from David Burke’s Primehouse to host two private dinners there. Table 52’s Art Smith did some corporate R&D in the kitchen. And chefs Jason Hammel and Bill Kim, from Lula and Urban Belly respectively, collaborated on a pop-up restaurant there in July, during the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival.
She’s convinced, she’d told me a week earlier, that she’ll be out of business by January.
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Shared-use kitchens are a relatively new concept, designed to meet the needs of a food scene increasingly geared toward locally sourced products and small-batch production. Access to a commercial kitchen is a significant barrier to entry for a food business. Commercial kitchens are big, complicated, and expensive to run—monthly overhead for Logan Square Kitchen, with utilities, pest control, waste pickup, janitorial services, insurance, etc, is about $10,000. Shared-use kitchens allow small-food artisans and other entrepreneurs to ramp up legally with a minimum of risk. Also known as contract kitchens, they’re fully equipped and licensed spaces available for rent on an hourly basis to caterers, bakers, confectioners, and others who either can’t afford their own kitchen or simply don’t need a full-time workspace.
After the Kitchen Chicago fiasco, the city changed its policy to allow multiple business licenses at one address. But each new license is still tied to that address, costs $660 up front for two years, and triggers a new inspection of the space, something Murray notes is immensely time consuming: a typical restaurant gets inspected on average once a year; since February, Logan Square Kitchen has been inspected six times, the busier Kitchen Chicago 27 times.
Murray says almost all her early discussion of this business model with the city was verbal. But her former lawyer details the nature of her plans in a January 2010 letter to zoning commissioner Patricia Scudiero: “The chefs using the kitchen will use the front area to serve food to the public—as would occur in a restaurant. Two regular planned activities are: a Saturday morning pastry cafe, and a Monday and Tuesday night dinner service by various chefs. On occasion the first floor could be used by third parties to host events. . . . [but] such a use is not intended as the predominant use.”
Logan Square Kitchen’s retail food license was issued last August, and the first client fired up the ovens on September 1, 2009. That, says Murray, “was when the wheels came off.”
