Results
Saltspec's feasibility methodology comes from years inside restaurant operations and commercial construction, including the deals that never should have happened.
30+
restaurant and food-retail buildouts delivered
100+
site feasibility visits and assessments
800-4,000 SF
typical footprints
$50M+
in construction value managed
9 states
coast to coast
A partial list of the things that quietly reprice a deal.
Required consultants and design criteria that add cost before a hammer swings.
Can cap seat counts, or stall approvals entirely.
Swing dramatically by state and jurisdiction.
Quietly oversizes the HVAC budget.
Murals, signage, facade changes.
Water, gas, and electrical capacity versus the concept's real load.
Across signage, lighting, and millwork vendors.
Determines the real opening date.
FIELD NOTES
Names withheld. Lessons kept.
A promising site for a national brand cleared rent, demographics, and layout. The dealbreaker was outside the building: no compliant path to a code-required trash enclosure, and the landlord wouldn't cede the space. The deal died before the lease, cheaply. Tag: Initial Feasibility Review.
A space that looked move-in ready was fed by a domestic water line too small for the concept's fixture count and equipment load. Upsizing meant trenching across a live parking lot at tenant expense. Caught during pre-lease diligence, the cost either moves the negotiation or kills the site. Tag: Full Feasibility Review.
Post-tension slab construction meant plumbing couldn't route where the concept's standard layout assumed. Caught at the feasibility walk, the kitchen was re-planned around existing penetrations before the lease was signed, instead of discovered by a coring contractor after it. Tag: Full Feasibility Review.
Beneath one space, soil compaction had failed years earlier — the slab had sunk and simply been re-poured over the top. Nearly impossible to spot on paper, and hard even in person; obvious only in hindsight. The lesson shapes every assessment since: some risks can't be eliminated pre-lease, only identified as unknowns and priced into contingency. Pretending otherwise is how budgets break. Tag: Full Feasibility Review.
A basement space in a dense urban market had no gravity path from a code-compliant grease interceptor to the sewer. The only viable design was a pumped system with a dedicated pump-out port — an engineered, priced line item before commitments were made, rather than a plumbing crisis after demolition. Tag: Buildout Roadmap.
An older building in New York offered ceiling heights far below what standard kitchen ductwork assumes. The entire HVAC system was redesigned around the structure — equipment selection, duct routing, and hood placement all driven by inches. The concept fit; the standard drawings didn't. Tag: Full Feasibility Review.
An electrical service upgrade required shutting down a building's main gear, meaning night work, landlord coordination, and a project inherited mid-stream from a construction manager who had lost control of it. The buildout was re-sequenced, the landlord and tenant expense split renegotiated, and the project delivered. Tag: Owner's Representation.
A second-floor concept needed a Type I grease duct routed through occupied space to the roof, a six-figure scope nobody had priced. Identifying it early turned it into a landlord negotiation item instead of a mid-construction change order. Tag: Buildout Roadmap.
Days before opening, a health inspector's interpretation of code threatened the stock-and-train date. Knowing the code well enough to respectfully push back, and being right, kept the opening on schedule. Every project ends the same way: walking each inspector through sign-offs until the doors can legally open. Tag: Owner's Representation.
Operator: Concurrently ran five high-volume food and beverage venues generating roughly $10M in combined annual sales: scheduling, margins, throughput, compliance. Feasibility reviews are written by someone who has lived the P&L they affect.
Builder: Construction project management across national multi-unit brands and independent operators: entitlements, permitting, landlord negotiations, and capital planning against required returns. Day to day, that meant managing architects early so the operational flow fit the footprint, not the other way around, coordinating shop drawings across signage, lighting, and millwork vendors, and negotiating GCs and subs in their own language.
That's the honest answer to almost every site question we've ever been asked. Very few conditions kill a deal outright, most just cost more or take longer than anyone budgeted. Saltspec's job isn't to talk you out of a space, it's to tell you what "possible" actually costs, in dollars and months, before you're committed. Sometimes the right answer is to walk away early and cheaply. More often, it's to walk in with the right number.