Basements:
More Than Just Boxes
(page 3)

he Garofalos are not alone in expanding the function of their basement. "There’s hardly a restaurant that doesn’t use their basement for some kind of food preparation," says Chuck Hunt, executive vice president of the New York City chapter of the New York State Restaurant Association. The crunch has been tighter for restaurants recently because landlords are giving shorter leases, rents are going up and restaurants have had more competition in the last seven or eight years since the industry has been doing well. But the use of the basement for more than storage is "not a new trend," says Hunt. "Restaurant owners are very creative in Manhattan."

Underneath West Side Market on Broadway, three

David Lit chops meat in the basement of West Side Market.

PHOTO: Shoshana Kordova

to four butchers spend several hours a day with cleavers in hand, chopping up slabs of meat and then wrapping the pieces in smaller packages for sale upstairs. They are among the pproximately 15 employees – out of about 80 in total – who work in the basement at least part of the day. Many employees hang up their coats and take their breaks downstairs; several eat their lunch at a table near the meat-slicing room.

here are disadvantages to preparing food and storing supplies in the basement. "It would be more helpful if we had it upstairs," says Nick Kato, a manager at West Side Market, which has been open since 1977. Now the store has to employ about five people, at a rate of $7 to $10 an hour, just to stock the basement with the supplies delivered up to 50 times per week – only to bring those supplies back upstairs as needed. The market is open 24 hours a day, every day.

But the store would be even worse off if it had no basement. "Space is so significantly tight in New York City," says Kato, that "we wouldn’t be able to have enough merchandise if we didn’t have the basement, because we wouldn’t have the floor space."

Without a basement, the 8,000-square-foot selling area would have to be reduced to about 5,000 square feet to make room for storage and food preparation that would be more limited than the nearly 8,000 square feet the basement provides. And that would not be good for the store. "It would be significantly less business because you have significantly less space and less variety to offer," says Kato.

NEXT PAGE: Some store owners open up part of the lower floor for retail.

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