How to Run a Club

This is a great resource for anyone wanting to know what is involved in running a music venue. The owner of DNA Lounge in San Francisco set this up. It has a blog, a list of permits that the club had to apply for, etc.

DNA Lounge: Behind the Scenes

Here is one of the blog entries to show you what you'll learn:

So, yeah, still no kitchen. This may sound familiar to those of you who were following along when we went through the permit dance four years ago. Whenever you build anything, you need a bunch of inspections, and the last one is Building, who is (also) a meta-inspection, who looks at the signatures on your job card that say that the earlier inspections were passed.

Our other inspections are finished, and the building inspector comes out, and says, "Where's your fire inspection?" Our contractor says, "Where's the checkbox that says we need a fire inspection?" The inspector says "Oh, you always need a fire inspection." (And I say, "Why didn't our contractor know that?", but that's neither here nor there.)

Then we schedule a fire inspection. Three weeks go by. The fire inspector doesn't like our sprinkler heads (we need the kind that poke out instead of the flush-mount for some reason.) That means: we need to get someone out here to change them. Three weeks. Then we need to have Fire come back. Three weeks. Then we need to have building come back. Three weeks.

And this is how we've been perpetually two months from completion for almost a year.

You can't even pipeline these visits and schedule the inspector for the day after the work is done, because half the time contractors just fail to show up, meaning now you're late and have pissed off the inspector.

Its kind of insane how much this room has cost already, given that it's basically just a hallway with three sinks and a table.

Part of the screwage here is that, for commercial space, you're required to use licensed contractors. In your home, you can just get some Time-Life books and go crazy, and as long as you do the work right, you'll pass the inspections. But you aren't allowed to DIY in a business. It's a conspiracy of some sort, specifically designed to make my life suck.

And even if you were feeling like a scofflaw, it's not like a kitchen could just "appear" one day without that being noticed...

_________________________________

Anyway, assuming our kitchen ever opens, what do you think we should serve? What would you want to eat here? Think in both categories "dinner" and "snack".

We don't have a grill, or gas, or a hood, which means we are limited to things you can make without open flame or a vat of grease: microwave, hot-plate, and toaster oven, basically. (And a majority of the food needs to be prepared on-site, for permit reasons.)

Drunk people, of course, like the grease. But putting in the kind of exhaust hood we'd need for that would have been an additional $20,000! Shoot me.

It's been incredibly frustrating around here lately; I walk around and see thing I want to fix, or improve, or just change for the sake of variety, and it all costs money that we don't have.