Contractors didn’t have the building ready for inspection tomorrow. Now I have to reach far and wide and virtually pull back all those emails I sent to all of you. We’re re-scheduling our pre-open activities. Can’t wait to see you there!
NEW BURLINGTON DATES, JOIN US!
Clover VIP Party (invitation only)
Wednesday 6/26
5pm-8pm
Free Sandwich Day (open to public)
Thursday 6/27
11am-2pm
First full day of service!
Friday 6/28
6am-9pm
Ayr, Michael, and I were at Burlington setting up. I was cleaning construction dust off the windows. Ayr said, “Let me show you how to do that better.” He stepped outside with me and showed me the best way to do streak-free Windex (if you want to know, you have to do it really fast, minimal Windex, clean paper towel).
Then we heard, “CLICK.” The door to the restaurant locked. Our backpacks, my computer, Ayr’s car keys. All inside. It started pouring rain. It was 5pm on a Friday and all the contractors were gone.
All I’m going to say is that 30 minutes later Ayr had broken into CloverBUR, and Michael got the first key to his new restaurant. We promise we’ll have our act together on 6/27, Free Sandwich Day at CloverBUR.
I’ve been writing a few posts about ceilings lately.
Jinhee, one of our architects, was in the other day and had this amazing idea. I’ve mentioned before that we’ve been trying to figure out what to do with the ceiling of our restaurant in Brookline Village. Jinhee looked at it and decided we could open up a portion of the drop ceiling to expose the wood beams above.
This picture shows Rachel, who will be running this restaurant looking at the ceiling with me. We’re trying to get our heads around this change. It’s really exciting, and changes the feeling of the space. We were thinking to add wood panels. But now we’ll be removing material, exposing what is behind, instead of adding material and hiding what is behind. This is much more Clover.
I visited Mystic Woodworking the other day. Jim, the guy on the right of this shot, was my tour guide and co-owns the company. Their operation was staggering. He brought me through building after building after building. They had an airplane hangar building the set for the Boston Ballet Nut cracker. The ENTIRE SET. That’s like 5 stories high. They had packing boxes for the chandeliers that were taller than I am. They do metal work, and wood work, and have the largest water jet cutter I’ve ever seen. It was really amazing.
The wood there on the floor is going to be the counter tops for our restaurant in Burlington, MA. I’m really excited about these pieces. See that beautiful streak down the middle. That’s sometimes called heartwood. It’s probably discolored due to the age of the tree. This is from a silver maple tree.
Jim and I were going back and forth on the wood type. He couldn’t believe it was maple. I was pretty sure Berkshire Lumber (the place I bought it) said that’s what is is. He showed me how heavy maple is, and there’s no question, this wood wasn’t nearly as heavy. But I was pretty sure it was maple. I looked it up after and turns out Silver Maple and a few other varieties of Maple are considered “soft maple.” They ARE lighter weight.
This post is a bit like the last. That’s our ceiling framed up. It’s our only ceiling. It’s just above the entrance to the bathrooms.
How can that be the only ceiling? Well we have this crazy wood paneled sculpture sort of thing enveloping the back area. And there’s going to be bare ceiling for the rest of the restaurant, just painted out, but bare. Minimum materials. Maximum height. Maximum transparency.
No, that’s not a picture from 2 years ago of Clover HSQ construction. That’s a photo from 2 weeks ago of what will be the next Clover (after Burlington and Brookline Village).
That’s going to be Clover Kendall Square. That’s right, Kendall. Given our truck at Kendall we’ve been determined that someday we’d open a full restaurant in that area. I thought it might take 5 years before we found the right opening. When Chipotle opened we watched their construction jealously. There just aren’t that many openings on Main St. and that’s where we wanted to be.
Then Jesse told me about this spot. Jesse is our Real Estate Lawyer, advisor, and a long-time friend of Clover. I discovered the space was being created alongside a larger project to create a new entrance for Google. This is beautiful new space between Legal Seafoods and the Coop. Seemed too good to be true, but I had to temper my excitement.
I found the landlord was Boston Properties, and wasn’t sure this was going to work out. Boston Properties (NYSE: BXP) is one of the largest landlords in the country. And we’re just tiny, right? How would we have a shot at this space?
A bunch of meetings and tastings and meals and secret shopping and we find ourselves with a lease. I couldn’t be happier. I think this is going to be absolutely amazing. Lots more to come. Google folks, I know it’s hard to compete with your awesome in-house dining. But we’ve come to know some of you at the trucks. What would you like to see in this space? We already have dreams of creating a little “lab” within our food lab that would allow you to test/ play with new ideas. I’m thinking a couple of screens/ an area of the restaurant that would be open to Google developers who want to see how live people interact with their ideas.
I keep loving this little space. I feel like I shouldn’t. It’s much more modest than most of our other upcoming projects. It used to be a Papa Ginos. It’s a little riskier for us than some other locations that are in the pipeline. It’s going to be take-out only.
But it’s got this great feeling. Our transformations here are similar to what we do most places we tackle: we remove stuff. We’re simplifying the lighting, removing walls, opening the space up. And each step we take it’s feeling better and better.
That’s Jim building out our Brookline restaurant.
I really love this space. Excited to share it with you soon.
While I was at the restaurant the plumbing inspector came by and gave the thumbs up. That means next time I’m here these pipes will be covered with concrete.
I first learned about this construction called “slab on grade” at our East Cambridge location. It still feels sort of crazy to me. Concrete is cast over dirt. I don’t know why they do this in commercial construction, cheaper than a basement? I don’t know of homes made that way.
So when you want to run electrical and plumbing you have to cut up the concrete floor. They use these big wheel things, similar to what you’d see on a highway project. And pull back the concrete, then dig our the trenches (by hand in our case). At the end you’d never know what was under your feet. It’s this complex network of pipes. In the case of Burlington we have a sanitary waste line, we have a grease waste line (separate from sanitary). Each of these terminates in several locations. We have 6 vents, one for each drain. We have electrical under there. It’s really amazing. We’ll have some photos next week that will have this looking more like what you know as a restaurant.
I checked in with Al, our construction supervisor on the Burlington restaurant the other day. We have an issue. They finished trenching, which means tearing up the concrete floors (see image above). But they didn’t find the sanitary waste line where they thought it was going to be. Uhgg.
There are a couple of problems here. First, our landlord built bathrooms for us. That sounds great on the face of it, like it would speed our project up and reduce costs. But that’s not how it’s turned out. I’m going to make sure we never have landlord build bathrooms in the future. They aren’t the way we want them to be, so we’re going to re-do them (the landlord is helping us with that). But we have other issues, like this sanitary line. We had bad information from our engineers. Anyway, turns out the sanitary line is right beneath the bathrooms. The landlords contractors dug it up, connected to it, then covered, poured cement, and build bathrooms over the line.
Of course these issues will all be worked out. Al’s a pro. But it has me thinking hard about our approach to construction and how to avoid things like this. It’s crazy to think we’re going to have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to uncover a pipe that was just sitting there open to the air a month ago.
I’ll keep you posted on our progress. In the meantime we’re parking in Burlington with the truck this week!
I’ve been at Starbucks Burlington since 6am.
I got a note from our construction supervisor last night saying there was a problem with the trenching they’re doing. Apparently the drawings we had from our engineers (BLW engineering) were not accurate. So I’m meeting him up here to review the situation.
I’m waiting for him at Starbucks. I tried to find an independent coffee shop in the area and had no luck. I’m constantly trying products doing my best to learn where competitors are and what they do. And while Starbucks isn’t exactly a company we think of as a competitor, there is a lot to admire and learn from them.
I bought a medium latte and an oatmeal. It was the oatmeal that really caught my attention. Check out that picture. That’s the packaging I got for ONE OATMEAL! Isn’t that sort of amazing? Really! I count 7 pieces of packaging for this product: a bag, a plastic bag wrapped plastic straw, a nut pack in plastic, “fresh blueberries” in plastic (packaged 4/27/13, they actually list that on there which I think is sort of cool, but not exactly fresh as they are almost a month old and from California), a packet of sweetener (that I didn’t ask for) and the oatmeal itself with a lid. Wow!
I don’t know if this amazes anyone else, but I’ve been really obsessed with packaging lately. We’re trying to make our food better togo. And I think we’re on a great track. But do you know how many items you get when you order oatmeal from us? 1. A cup of oatmeal. To be fair most customers will help themselves to a spoon. That’s 2 items. What do you think about the excess packaging you get when you order food out? Does it bother you? Do you think about it at all? Where does it go?
We're here to make food you love, the kind you talk about and look forward to eating. The Clover Food Lab is serving up a new type of fast food. This food is local, it’s just-cut, when we can it is organic.
You can learn more about
our origins,
our food,
our mistakes,
and everything else about us at this website.
Ayr Muir
Founder and CEO
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