Feeding a Dream series (May 24-27, 2006)
When Denise DiPaolo told me she was thinking of applying to Montague’s commercial homesteading program to start up a restaurant in what had been an abandoned laundromat, I jumped at the chance to follow her dream over the course of several years, not knowing whether she would succeed. The journey, I discovered, was fascinating.
In Turners Falls, a village of countless bricks, Denise DiPaolo has been cooking up plans to build a new future. The middle-aged single mother of two has been immersing herself in the community where, just this year, she bought a two-story brick Victorian house that overlooks the Connecticut River.
DiPaolo, a former community organizer for the Franklin County Community Development Corp., anticipates a reawakening in this one-time busy mill town.
She has intentionally set down roots here, charting her future and laying down its foundation, brick by brick.
Even before being laid off from the community organizing job in 2002, she had begun working with Turners Falls landlords and trying to get downtown residents involved in supporting the businesses there to get the community going again.
Already a member of the Shea Theater board of directors, she also has become active in a Montague Economic Development Task Force. The group is focused on breathing new life into the vacant Strathmore Paper mill as restoration of the Colle Opera House and opening of Great Falls Discovery Center suggests a turning point for a new Turners Falls economic renaissance.
That’s why she moved to town, and has been working on a business plan for a restaurant.
Armed with copies of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,” she went before the Montague selectmen and told them the time was right for Turners. And for her.
She proposed turning a run-down, three-story building the town owned on Second Street into her own Back Alley Cafe Pub. DiPaolo has been talking with potential investors and working with architects about the building, which Montague officials had seized for nonpayment of taxes. They must choose between her and the Northeast Foundation for Children, both competing to buy the building for a dollar in exchange for promises of redevelopment.
DiPaolo has imagined running a cafe since she was in high school in Pennsylvania. “For 30 years, it’s been a dream,” she says. When she first saw the vacant Second Street building, she said, Oh my God!’ It’s an ideal location, sitting right by the Shea Theater!”
For two years, she’s been writing business plans and talking with friends about the idea, and trying to get her life in order. Like many other county entrepreneurs past and present, DiPaolo has always wanted to go into business for herself. But she started having children and found her life had changed.
Her recent layoff from the CDC brought another change, which she’s turning to her advantage:
She’s taken a job as a hostess at the Riverview Cafe in Brattleboro and has begun doing catering in Northampton to learn the restaurant ropes.
Meanwhile, she estimates the Second Street building will cost $150,000 to renovate and $100,000 for startup capital. And she hopes to raise $50,000 in seed money from investors and by selling slate tiles, engraved with contributors’ names to attach to the building exterior.
The plan is for the basement to become the pub serving micro-brewed beers and for a first-floor cafe serving` “simple, but good food.” The second floor would eventually become a space for live music.
She hopes to open her cafe-pub by fall
September, 2004
DiPaolo has lost her bid. Northeast Foundation for Children will move its offices from East Greenfield to Second Street.
After spending nearly $10,000 out-of-pocket for a floor plan, contractors’ estimates and marketing, DiPaolo is now focused on a long-vacant Laundromat and soft ice cream place on Avenue A that the town wants to fill with a viable business.
Her proposal for the 166 Avenue A building is the only one the town has received. DiPaolo believes the space and location — “a really sweet spot” — are actually better for what she now envisions as an Italian restaurant.
It’s more compact and right on the main street.
“When I ran the numbers, an espresso-based coffee business with pastries really is a volume-based business. You have to get the street traffic of literally thousands of people over the course of a week. That isn’t something I think Turners could support at this time.”
Harkening back to memories of visiting the farmers market every weekend growing up in Lancaster, Pa., and her own family history, DiPaolo is focused on “simple, fresh, uncomplicated food.”
February, 2005
A delicious array of books like “For Cooks Who Love Wine,” “Chocolate and Coffee,” and “Culinaria Italy” dot DiPaolo’s living room. She’s on the couch, a cup of coffee in hand, awaiting news about refinancing the house she bought two years ago. A bubbling real estate market has nearly doubled the house value, and interest rates are at an historic low.
This allows DiPaolo to refinance her house to borrow $10,000 toward renovation of the 3,600-square-foot Avenue A building, constructed a century ago as a shoe store. The town is willing to sell for $1, but it’s in bad shape.
“It needs everything. It will be a total gut job with all new everything in it,” she said.
That translates into well over $250,000: $170,000 to $180,000 just to renovate the structure and another $100,000 for startup equipment and supplies.
She’s approached a couple of potential business investors, each of whom may be willing to put in $10,000, and she’s depending on the CDC to provide gap financing to get the business going.
But bankers, she’s learned, aren’t head over heels when it comes to very shaky ventures like a restaurant.
“In theory, it’s great,” she says, “but in actuality, they’re not that confident that this is going to go. Most restaurants fail within the first year or two. What makes them not fail? That’s the question.”
To step up her learning curve on restaurants, she’s traded her Brattleboro diner job after less than a year and is now managing Sunderland’s Blue Heron restaurant, a high-end place closer to her vision.
A Brattleboro, Vt., architect, one of four she’s worked with already, is working on a floor plan that includes a bar, a kitchen visible to diners and a dining patio.
“I think it will be a huge draw and be really appealing to the public,” DiPaolo imagines. “In fair weather people love to sit outside. I’m excited about that piece of it.
DiPaolo has watched the slowly budding Turners Falls downtown over the past decade, and now that Hallmark Institute has leased the Colle Opera House for a photography museum, she wants to be in business when it blossoms.
“There are no places to eat in Turners. In some ways, it is a big risk.” Yet, she adds, “Hopefully it will influence other businesses to come in and join the ranks.”
And yet, DiPaolo says, “I’m not stupid to think, Just build it and they’ll come.’ I have to be creative.”
DiPaolo has been doing her homework.
Yesterday, she met with Patrick McCarthy, who owns Jake’s restaurant in Northampton and who used to own White Salmon Grill in Sunderland.
“I called him out of the blue because someone said, You should talk to this guy,'” says DiPaolo. She showed him her plans, and he offered to examine the financial estimates she’s come up with.
“I’m going to have to have more realistic numbers,” she says. “He’s semi-retired and is looking for a new project. I’m in the market for a chef.”
The bank and CDC keep advising her to find a chef as a partner, someone willing to invest in the business. “They really want to see somebody else take some risk,” she says. “If it’s somebody I know, who has some reputation, I’d be willing to do that.”
Meanwhile, she’s thinking about placing an ad on the Culinary Institute of America’s Web site and is starting to put feelers out to see who’s available.
DiPaolo’s verve and nerve have helped her get this far.
“Every step of the way, I’ve been sent out with homework assignments: We need to see this, this and this, and you need to get your credit straightened out. I’m sure I’ve been a pain in the neck to a lot of people, just in my perseverance. I’ve been in people’s faces for quite a while now. It’s starting to work: They’re listening to me,” she says.
Greenfield Co-operative Bank Vice President Michael Davey, who knows DiPaolo from when he was on the CDC board, asked her the other day, “Have you considered Amherst for your business?
She has, but figures she couldn’t even afford the rent, let alone ever own real estate there.
As a new entrepreneur, DiPaolo keeps bumping up against conflicting sets of full-blown ideas of what her restaurant could be and the realities of the market in this reawakening factory village.
That means studying “what’s in vogue, what they’re going after, where they’re spending their money, what kind of environment they’d like to be in when eating,” says DiPaolo of her potential clientele, in a rush of explaining the complexities of business planning.
“All those kinds of details are really vital, and you have to cater to that.”
Her legs folded under her on the couch, she says she wants to make customers feel comfortable when they dine. Yet her plan is for white linen tablecloths. “It will be classy but casual, with impeccable service, with funky, great, warm ambiance.”
That funkiness is already tangible, with a pair of mahogany church pews from Charlemont that she bought a couple of years ago at a Deerfield antique shop, now patiently waiting in her foyer.
“I’ve been collecting furnishings for years,” says DiPaolo, who foresees placing them in a courtyard under a canvas awning with tables she’ll have built. “It will be a fun place to hang, won’t it?”
Her main job will be “to meet and greet, and to make people feel they belong and want to be there, that they are welcomed. I want it to feel like my home, like my kitchen, and to have it be a really fun place.”
She also knows this won’t be the upscale Blue Heron, where she’s gotten a rare taste of the prizes and pitfalls of running a top-flight restaurant. Her Turners Falls startup is going to have to be competitive. Thankfully, overhead in an Italian restaurant can be relatively low.
“Who doesn’t love pasta?” she asks. “Hearty, filling food. My menu will be very, very small in the beginning, with a couple or three salads, a couple or three entrees, and some soups. My long-range goal is to get dinnertime successful and add lunch.
Her latest “jumping off point” sample menu has a variety of pastas adding salmon, mussels, clams, skewered shrimp over pasta. There’s a filet mignon/shrimp shish kabob, and an antipasto for two with various olives, breads, cheeses, meats and vegetables.
“DiPaolo’s Cafe” with a seven-day-a-week schedule, would serve “Italian cuisine and other Mediterranean flavors” including gnocci Caprese: “homemade potato dumplings sauted with plum tomatoes, fresh mozzarella and basil,” as well as mahi-mahi with a spicy mango chutney and Mediterranean curry and create-your-own pizzas or panini.
DiPaolo is also toying with having an affordable set-price meal — start to finish — on the menu.
Meanwhile, she’s also excited by the multicultural possibilities in the village around her: Polish, Irish, Russian specials for lunch, maybe a kielbasa sandwich on the bar menu.
Her Yugoslavian hairdresser, Maria, offers her grandmother’s goulash recipe, and DiPaolo imagines a cook-off contest, with winners sampled on the menu or a flavor-filled street fair.
Maybe she can sell beers from around the world as well as a complement of local brews.
For that, she needs a beer and wine license. And maybe a liquor license down the road so she can offer “specialty drinks” like Limoncello to complement the menu, with after-dinner liqueurs.
“You know?” she asks. “Stuff like that would be so much fun to do.”
– RICHIE DAVIS