Jesse Winter
It took a team of architects, a six-figure budget and a year-and half to transform the 4,000-square-foot “chop shop” into the whimsical, Québécois restaurant.
They’ve gone from motor oil to olive oil.
The restaurateurs behind wildly popular three-month-old M. Wells Steakhouse have transformed a garage in an up-and-coming stretch of Long Island City into one of the city’s hottest new restaurants — complete with a basin of live trout, skylights and mismatched chandeliers.
RELATED: M. WELLS STEAKHOUSE: RESTAURANT REVIEW
“We were like ‘thanks, but no thanks,’” said co-proprietor Sarah Obraitis, when she first saw the oil-stained space with her husband, acclaimed chef and fellow M. Wells owner Hugue Dufour. “It didn’t even have bathrooms.”
It took a team of architects, a six-figure budget and a year-and half to transform the 4,000-square-foot “chop shop” into the whimsical, Québécois restaurant, which dishes up meaty bone-in burgers and a massive whole rib steaks called the tomahawk chop.
RELATED: DYNAMIC DUO OF FOOD RETURNS TO LONG ISLAND CITY
Ceiling rafters were replaced with brilliant black-and-gold wallpaper. A concrete bar and a kitchen countertop, where patrons can watch their steaks being grilled, were installed where auto mechanics once lubed the chassis and changed the oil.
Their landlord, Rockrose Development, replaced the bathrooms and upgraded the heating and plumbing, Obraitis said.
RELATED: SQUARE KNISHES TO HIT SHELVES AGAIN!
And the concrete floor, left uneven by the heavy vehicles that once inhabited the space, was sanded, polished and glossed.
Obraitis and her husband chose to leave the exterior of the former Euro Sport Collision Repair shop as is — preferring not to hang signage advertising the steakhouse outside the brick building.
RELATED: BLOODY MARY’S NYC COMEBACK
Kushner Studios, the architectural team behind the makeover, replaced the skylights and added glass blocks to the exterior wall to allow natural light into the space. They also painted he exposed brick walls a bright red.
“It was essentially a total gut [renovation],” said John Bedard, a junior partner at Kushner. “Everything that was in the space previously, we removed.”
Obraitis and Dufour have made a career of opening restaurants in off-beat Long Island City locales. They opened their first restaurant in 2010 in an old diner car on a desolate stretch of the neighborhood. Despite the lines of hungry foodies out the door, it closed a year later because the owners couldn’t come to a lease agreement with their landlord.
In 2012, they opened a cafe in the contemporary art museum MoMa PS1. “I grew up here,” Obraitis said of Long Island City. “It’s nice to be close to home.”
