Couple’s life intertwined with restaurant they’re renovating
Every renovation is a saga. I know. My wife and I have ours, which hasn’t exactly ended but settled down last year, when we finally moved down the street into a house we’d been fixing up on and off since 2008. But that’s a story for another day.
Shamim Allen and Craig Bailey’s saga is particularly visible to everyone in Saranac Lake. It’s right in the middle of a downtown that’s littered with vacant storefronts, and yet it, along with the Hotel Saranac and a new cafe on Main Street, is a sign of hope that downtown is down but not out, that it’s being built back up and will be pretty nice before long.
Since last year, Craig and Shamim have been gutting and rebuilding 33 Broadway, right on the Saranac River. They hope to reopen it this fall as the Fiddlehead Bistro.
That building has housed a whole bunch of restaurants, bars and other businesses over the years. I won’t try to list them all, but it seems to be best remembered as the home of Dr. Y’s and Morgan’s 11. (Fun fact: The Sagendorf Restaurant apparently shared the building with a taxidermist around 1909, as seen in a photo posted on Historic Saranac Lake’s local wiki website. One hopes space is all the two businesses shared.)
One of those restaurants, Desy’s, was where Craig came to work in 1986, when he was 17 and left his home in Westville. His cousin Dave Bailey was the chef, and Craig washed dishes, made sandwiches and even slept on the floor downstairs for a while until he got an apartment.
It’s also where he and Shamim went on their first date, a lobster dinner when they were both 20.
“That was my first really romantic date, a dinner date,” Shamim said.
Less romantically, she remembered Craig leaving her at the table several times to talk with his buddies in the kitchen.
“It was very funny because he was very shy and spent a lot of time hanging out with his co-workers,” she said. “He really liked the kitchen.”
It was a while before he asked her out again, but this time he offered to cook her dinner – shrimp scampi, which he had learned how to make in the kitchen of the Hilton in Lake Placid, where he worked under Chef Roger Steinbreuck (who now owns and runs Scott’s Florist with his wife in Saranac Lake).
“Craig really won me with his cooking,” Shamim said.
Back then, she said, he had long hair, listened to heavy metal and often expressed that musical taste on vulgar-looking T-shirts.
“He was a metalhead, but he was like a gentle metalhead,” she said. “I fell for him because he liked sunflowers. I just thought that was the cutest thing. I said, ‘You can’t really be a metalhead if you love sunflowers.'”
They got married when they were 24, then divorced, then got back together three years ago. Along the way, Craig advanced in his vocation, becoming a chef and owning a restaurant in New York City. He’ll be the Fiddlehead’s chef, and I can vouch for his cooking. It’s fantastic.
He wants to vary the menu often, following his instincts and whatever ingredients are in season. The bistro’s namesake, the succulent fiddlehead of a newly sprouted fern, is one of the less-than-usual items diners might expect to taste there.
The couple sees locals as their primary customer base, although they’ll certainly welcome visitors.
Shamim said she used to talk to Craig about running a restaurant together in their early days as a couple, but he didn’t think they’d work well with each other.
“He was probably right,” she said. “We were too young.” They communicate better now, at age 46.
She said she’s dreamed for a long time about fixing up an old building downtown. The idea of a place on the river was especially attractive, and she’s admired this particular structure since she was young and used to see it across the river while eating pizza at the Dew Drop Inn. It was Dr. Y’s bar then, and “It looked like everyone was having a good time there.”
All those things, including her and Craig’s shared history, drove her to buy 33 Broadway, but only after the price dropped by $100,000.
“I knew that it was in really terrible shape,” she said.
It was. They discovered early on that some of the wood on the river side was rotten, but the biggest blow was learning they had to hire professionals to remove vermiculite insulation in the ceiling. That set them back a month and tens of thousands of dollars.
Vermiculite by itself is not necessarily dangerous, but the U.S.’s oldest and biggest vermiculite mine, in Libby, Montana, was also an asbestos mine, and much of that material was contaminated with asbestos, which has been known to cause cancer.
To be safe, New York state now treats all vermiculite as if it contains asbestos, Craig said. They don’t even test.
If it had been their own house, they probably could have removed the stuff themselves and disposed of it cheaply at the Franklin County landfill, but for a commercial property you have to pay the big bucks for abatement.
“I cried a little,” Craig said, semi-sarcastically, followed by his characteristic, hearty laugh.
Overall, he and Shamim are upbeat about the project. They say having to remove that vermiculite let them raise the ceiling, which looked better and allowed better lighting and insulation. They also point out various lucky breaks that made the construction process easier.
But Shamim, who manages the financing and paperwork while Craig leads the work crew, said she’s struggled to not get overwhelmed.
“When I was losing too much sleep over it, I had to say, ‘Hey, this is a choice. No one’s forcing me to do this,'” she said.
They’ve completely rearranged the restaurant, which is now framed and insulated. Riverside windows that were closed long ago have been re-established, and tables will be put next to them. A bar was moved to the back. The kitchen, Craig’s “home away from home,” will be on the right as you walk in, and past that are a new bathroom and a staircase to the basement, which will have an office, coolers, and food prep and storage areas.
They’re leaving the back deck for phase 2 next year. The same goes for the room below it, which housed O’Reilly’s Pub a few years ago. That room tends to flood from the river, so the plan is for it to be an open pavilion, without windows, used in the summer as an art gallery, cafe and event space.
This is the kind of exciting but expensive project that Saranac Lakers, who are so used to businesses failing, tend to be skeptical of, but it’s really happening. Even if you think they’re crazy for taking it on, how could you not root for them?
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If you have a story idea for Peter Crowley’s new Roving Reporter column, tell it to him at 518-891-2600 ext. 22 or pcrowley@adirondackdailyenterprise.com.