#1: Ground Breaking
My name is Paul Nashak. For the last two decades opening and operating restaurants with the Mountain Sun Pubs and Breweries in Boulder, Denver and Longmont, CO, I resisted our company’s natural inclination toward superstitious restaurant operations. Never once did I close my eyes at the beginning of service to visualize a busy shift. I never bought a crystal for the back bar to encourage long dinner waits. I belly laughed until tears filled my eyes when we smudged facilities with sage before openings or when a restaurant hit a sales slump. For me, it was fun. These moments are some of the happiest of my life.
When I arrived at the ground breaking of Urban Field Pizza and Market—a new business venture with new business partners—I’m not going to lie, I had a smooth chunk of citrine crystal in my pocket. I acquired it at the beginning of the pandemic when the virus shut down a company I loved and an industry to which I devoted my life. I’ve charged it on my deck under every full moon since July, 2020. From my research, I knew the crystal represented positivity, abundance and strength. The virus took those things from so many of us, and I personally wanted them back.
Oddly, though, the reason I brought the crystal to our ground breaking had nothing to do with COVID-19. Out of the more than 300 potential locations we visited over 14 months to find Urban Field’s home, we chose the site of the old Longmont turkey factory. If there’s anything more terrifying than opening a restaurant at a time like this, it’s doing it on the exact spot where innumerable fowl perished beginning in 1951. I brought my crystal hoping it had absorbed enough full-moon energy to squash some seriously bad turkey juju and perhaps even a gobbling ghost or two.
From now until opening day of Urban Field Pizza and Market, we will share our adventures with you in a blog on our website. From why we chose 2nd and Main in Longmont to the trials and tribulations of building and opening a restaurant in the 11th hour of the pandemic. We’ll introduce the ownership team, who we are, where we’ve been, where we’re trying to go. We’ll cover what it was like to be restaurant operators the moment the pandemic shut us down as well as the tragic story of how our beloved industry was actually broken long before any of us heard of COVID-19. Most of all, you’ll hear about our vision for Urban Field, how we’ll support our community, how we’ll serve you.
Restaurants aren’t just four walls, tables, chairs, and bars. They’re not simply providers of sustenance. What a restaurant offers transcends cultural and ethnic barriers and speaks to the very core of the human condition. Restaurants are living, breathing organisms that anchor our communities and nurture our spirits. They offer a tiny pause, a brief suspension of reality, a chance at renewal. Depending on what sort of day you’re having, restaurants can soften the human condition or elevate it. They make you feel.
Restaurants are woven into the fabric of our lives. They’re where relationships and friendships often begin and sometimes end. They’re where we celebrate, congratulate, commemorate, as well as commiserate, mourn and grieve. Restaurants are gathering places. They’re forums for important discussions, venues for major life events, supporters of middle-school baseball teams. They’re where young artists doodle a first sketch or play a first gig. They’re often our first jobs.
When the idea of Urban Field was born four years ago, we didn’t have a food menu in mind, even a style of cuisine. We weren’t worried about what the bar would serve or the kind of service we’d offer. We only wanted to identify where we were coming from, what was important to us and what tools we would employ to improve the human condition of every guest we served. That exercise yielded four pillars upon which to build our restaurant and market, four principles that have guided every decision we’ve made since: Kindness, Acceptance, Patience, Empathy.