Basements:
More Than Just Boxes
(page 2)

uring the course of a day, Solis, who has been working in the restaurant business since he immigrated from Mexico 17 years ago, moves often between the street-level store open to all shoppers and the basement kitchen to which only the employees are privy. The kitchen workers prepare food to be sold in the main store as well as for the 25 to 30 catering jobs – such as the one for which Solis was chopping chicken – that the business gets per day. Solis says he likes working in the basement. It is relatively quiet, which means, he says, "I can do very well whatever I am doing."

If necessity is the mother of invention, then the high rent and limited space of a city as cramped as New York are the parents of basements like that of Milano Market, which hold a lot more than extra soda and napkins.

When restaurant broker Paul Fetcher was looking at lease prices in Manhattan five years ago, space was selling for $50 per square foot. Now the same square foot costs $100 to $125. As a result, restaurant owners have been cutting down on the nonrevenue-generating parts of their restaurants as much as they can. They try to dedicate up to 80 percent of the ground floor for eating, says Fetcher, and are increasingly moving food preparation and bathrooms to the basement.

In the 1970s and ’80s, owners would often use only 60 percent of the space for eating. "If you tried that today, you’d die," says Fetcher. True, rents have been stabilizing citywide since October, he says, but "we have to remember what a restaurant is. Customers don’t care about the trash and they don’t care how the food comes in, as long as they get it on their plate, and quickly."

Milano Market, located on Broadway between West 112^th and West 113^th streets, is the sixth restaurant the brothers Sal and Domenico Garofalo have opened. But it is the first to boast what they call a working basement.

"Starting a new business and restaurant is always a game, and you use every advantage you have," says Sal, 40. "If you have a big basement, use it." The primary reason the brothers decided to use the basement for food preparation, he says, is the cost of rent.

Unlike many other businesses, those that deal with food are the places "where a basement comes to life," says 34-year-old Domenico, known as "Dominic." "You start off with raw space, so it’s all to the imagination of the individual what to do about it."

The imagination of the Garofalos led them to install a hydraulic lift that transports food as well as workers between Milano Market’s 2,000-square-foot ground floor and its basement. The heavy objects, including wooden crates filled with Coca-Cola bottles, are set in the basement near the lift. For easy delivery, a motorized conveyor belt stretches across the second exit – stairs that lead from another part of the basement to the sidewalk outside the store.

NEXT PAGE: "Space is so significantly tight in New York City," says Nick 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."