Ask George: "Why do restaurants put paper in their windows during construction and prior to opening?"
Ask George : Why do restaurants put paper in their windows during construction and prior to opening? Byron K, St. Louis
That depends on whom you ask.
Ask a general contractor and he might tell you it’s to keep wandering eyes from wandering inside, as power tools are worth serious money on the resale market. One contractor confessed that it works the other way as well: a papered window keeps a worker’s eyes from being distracted outside, by all the pretty passers-by.
Ask a municipality and you'll learn that “papering the windows is not a requirement but rather a strong suggestion,” according to Tom Niemeier, President of SPACE Architecture + Design, a company responsible for many local restaurant renovations. “It serves two purposes,” he said. “It’s both a theft deterrent and it shields all that's unsightly.”
Ask a restaurant owner or tenant and you get more answers. Some want to maintain the element of suspense until the space is spiffed and spit-shined...at which point the paper gets ripped down en masse, akin to unwrapping a giant gift. Others want the privacy that a papered-up window affords. Vendors and salesmen who “just happened to be in the area” (to say nothing of nosy Dining Editors sniffing out the next scoop) often barge in without appointment and disrupt whatever the owner/manager had otherwise planned for that day.
Chris Sommers, co-owner of the six Pi Pizzeria stores, got so bothered by interruptions on previous projects that when he was building out the Pi 2 Go space in Chesterfield, he devised an elaborate smokescreen just to throw off intruders. He created a fictitious entity—Armadillo Joe’s Tex-Mex & Taxidermy—complete with color logo (at left), and placed it in the papered-up window, which led the curious to a website complete with Western-themed music. Ian Froeb, the RFT’s restaurant critic, noted that “half the new restaurants in town don't bother throwing up a site even half as rudimentary as Armadillo Joe's!” The ruse was successful and Sommers revealed the spoof just days before Pi 2 Go’s opening.