Shawmut Design and Construction of Boston has built high-end restaurant space from Chicago to Miami, and recently finished the build-outs for two of Liberty Wharf’s high-profile eateries – the three-story Legal Sea Foods and Del Frisco’s steakhouse, which together total about 35,000 square feet.
Thomas Goemaat, Shawmut’s CEO, sat down with Banker & Tradesman recently to talk about the challenges and triumphs of creating such a defined character for both spaces. Here’s what went into the project, in Goemaat’s own words:
‘Hand In Hand’
Shawmut is a builder of specialty restaurants, so this is something we do all over the country. We work very closely with designers … and really what we do is work hand in hand with the designer and owner to bring budget information and buildability information to the project in order to create what the designer is imagining …
There’s an awful lot behind the walls and ceilings that make it all work. You really have to understand what’s going on behind that bar in terms of equipment and plumbing. The kitchens are really specialty areas in terms of making sure it all functions properly together, and that everything is waterproofed and there’s proper airflow in and out of the kitchen. …
The issues tend to be pretty consistent when you’re building a restaurant, and those are mainly around coordination. Every restaurateur has specific equipment they want, and every piece of equipment has very specific requirements about how much power is required to run it, what size the gas line needs to be. …
It’s very important to coordinate the food service equipment with the infrastructure that’s feeding it. Also, there are a lot of people that will be in this space at one time, so you need a lot of air conditioning and ventilation so the place stays pleasant. These are all things that make a restaurant more complicated than an office space, for example.
3D-Modeling
What’s really useful for all that today is [three dimensional Building Information Modeling]. And we use BIM a lot, especially in a restaurant because there’s only so much room above the ceiling and below the floors. We basically draw the job in 3D and make sure there’s room for the duct work and the plumbing and electrical.
For the challenges of the site – logistically it’s not that bad because [the Liberty Wharf building is] not a high-rise building, so loading and things like that were not problems. What’s interesting about this site is you really can’t run any plumbing under the wharf, so all the plumbing has to be above that wharf level. When you walk into Legal’s, you notice that portions of the restaurant are elevated. One of the reasons for that is that’s where the plumbing is running to get out the building to get into the sanitary system, which is in the street. That’s why you see raised slabs in the restaurants. That was one of the challenges – how high do we have to raise the slab in order to get enough pitch to get out into the street?
Retractable Roof
The building was really built to house restaurants, so that was helpful. So, really, the challenges are about coordinating everything and procuring custom materials and fabrications. The retractable roof [at Legal Sea Foods] was very challenging. The designers really had to work that to get it right. Then, from our standpoint, the procurement and getting it there and coordinating the structural and installation in a timely fashion was pretty challenging because it’s not a common thing. As the weather started to get better and summer came and people started to realize what a great site this would be, there was really a sense of, we have to get open, we have to get open. That’s not atypical. The ground floor opened first at Legal’s and just did tremendous business, so the urgency around getting open increased. We were given a very tight date, and it’s not atypical to see us there last minute buttoning things up, but we knew we’d make it. So there was quite a bit of overtime that we worked to get these restaurants open for the summer season. I’m sure these restaurants will do great year-round, but sitting out on that deck in the summer is something of a rare thing in Boston.
From Pilings To Flooring
One of the really cool things about Liberty Wharf is at Legal Sea Foods. Because this is a completely new wharf that was built here, the old woow den pilings that held up the wharf that held up [Jimmy’s Harborside] were pulled out. When wooden pilings remain submerged in water, those pilings can last hundreds of years as long as they are not exposed to air. They were in really good shape, so they were salvaged and sent to a mill in Amish country in Pennsylvania, and we actually have photographs of [after they were milled] of the boards on a wagon being pulled by horses and the Amish. And that is what makes the wooden floor as you walk into Legal’s ground floor. And then you have some very high-tech materials as you go up to the third floor lounge area where there is a retractable roof and walls, so there’s sort of this balance of the old and the new that helps create the space.
With Del Frisco’s, it’s all about quality and creating the very beautiful and elegant finishes – like the speakers and lights in the ceiling being laid out very specifically in the right place so it all flows together.
