Five months after a devastating fire closed the downtown Hartford location of The Place 2 Be, the restaurant reopened to the public on Friday.
The fire, which started when a person tossed a cigarette near the restaurant, caused $100,000 in damage to the interior of the eatery at 5 Constitution Plaza.
“He smoked a cigarette and flipped it. Where it landed, it caught near the dumpster,” said Gina Luari, founder of The Place 2 Be. “The heat from the patio burst our windows and all the smoke came in. Our sprinkler system went off and disintegrated everything inside. There was a flood. Our equipment got fried.”
Luari said in May that she hoped to reopen by June. But she said Friday that “it’s just been very hard.
“We had to bring everything up to code after the fire. We had to put a new hood and ventilation system in. Trying to get everything straightened out, the buildout, the insurance, it’s been painful,” she said.
The location is now open 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week. It is one of four locations of The Place 2 Be: another on Franklin Avenue in Hartford, one in West Hartford’s Blue Back Square and a fourth at the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Luari said she is now “about a month out” from opening the fifth location, at 338 Elm St. in New Haven. She is also working on opening locations in Boston and in Texas.
She added that RAW, her seafood restaurant at 280 Trumbull St. in Hartford, which received a $150,000 HartLift grant, should open by the end of October. The development of that restaurant, she said, was delayed when she had to pull construction resources off RAW to repair the Constitution Plaza restaurant.
Susan Dunne can be reached at sdunne@courant.com.
