Vivace closed its doors last week. Kristen Wile/UP

Vivace, an Italian restaurant in the Metropolitan development, closed its doors after a final service on New Year’s Eve. Owned by Urban Food Group out of Raleigh, Vivace was the restaurant group’s first concept in Charlotte. As it came time to renegotiate the restaurant’s lease, Jennings looked to downsize the restaurant. When no good solution could be found to allow Vivace to stay in a smaller footprint, the restauranteur decided to close Vivace. However, it’s not closed for good. Jennings says he’s currently in talks over leasing a new space for the restaurant. We spoke to him about why Vivace didn’t work, and what’s next. —Kristen Wile

Unpretentious Palate: We’ve been hearing for a while that you were looking to shrink Vivace’s footprint. What changes to the lease were you seeking to make the restaurant more successful?
Kevin Jennings: The discussion about a smaller space was included within the lease negotiations. It wasn’t necessarily before just saying, ‘Hey, give us a smaller space.’ It was, ‘Hey, listen, how can we allow Vivace to stay here?’ And that was one of the discussions, how we would maybe break the space up to make it smaller, how we could reconfigure it, and at the end of the day, the landlord really didn’t feel that there was a great way. And I kind of have to agree with them. We could’ve given up the upstairs space and had that go to maybe a residential condo. The restaurant, the way we built it, there’s a stairwell kind of in the middle of it, so the space makes sort of a U around that. The kitchen’s on one side and the dining room and the access to the upstairs and all, that’s on the other and the office is in an upstairs space on the kitchen side. So it’s hard for anyone to break it up.

There was a plan at one point to give back the main dining room, uh, because there’s a side, there’s two sets of double doors off the main dining room, to give that up and then wall off the kitchen and then turn that into a retail space in the front. … At the end of the day, the landlord is in a unique situation there at Metropolitan because what is driving more shopping centers now is food and. At one time it was an amenity and now it’s more like the driver of these shopping centers. And so they didn’t want to reduce the number of food and beverage offerings through the reduction of square footage there. They would have rather had Vivace shrink and then another restaurant also be joining the space, which was really hard to try and figure out.

UP: Are you thinking you might open Vivace in a new space in Charlotte?
KJ: I have a space that I would like to open Vivace in and we are very early in that conversation.

UP: What is it about a restaurant that size that’s hard to make work?
KJ: I don’t necessarily think it’s that size. I think the Vivace concept, I can only tell you that it works right now in 4,000 square feet. And we have the Vivace concept, even with slightly different versions of it, in other locations as well. And they all work at 3,000, 4,000 square feet, plus some patio dining. Plain and simple, back in ’06 and ’07, when we were expanding and we were getting ready to go to Charlotte and do that restaurant, we just got greedy. All the restaurants at that point in time, everybody was building bigger. The chains of the world that normally were 10,000 or 12,000 square feet, go into 15,000. Other restauranteurs I knew that operated the restaurants in my size, they were going up to 6,000, 7,000 square feet. That space, when we originally looked at it with Peter Pappas, was a little over 6,000. We told them we were going to build a mezzanine level because the ceilings are 45 feet high. He was okay with the idea, but he also said, ‘Kevin, that’s 6,000 square feet. You probably don’t need it. You’ve got a big patio.’ Being the smart developer that he is, he was right.

We added a 2,000-square-foot mezzanine level. The main issue was there was a lot of expense in building that, and the city got involved and, we disagreed, but they said we exceeded the allowable square footage so we were going to have to put an elevator in there to provide for access. That drove the cost way up and Peter was willing to participate with us with the idea that we would pay some amount of rent and overage rent and maintenance and that kind of thing for that space, which is not always the case. Sometimes when you have a second level, you either don’t pay that or you pay a much-reduced rate on that square footage. The expense of the space is huge.

I would say that a restaurant that size you just need more volume. When you look at other restaurants like Mac’s Speed Shop, you know, some of those restaurant concepts that are huge. They’re a lower cost check average type concept and a lot of people have to go through in order to make that concept work well.

I look at that 8,300-square-foot space and I think that’s just the same thing — that they would have to have a restaurant that’s not as high end, not as pricey, and just allows for more volume to be coming through, you know? Vivace is a higher end kind of thing, we’re asking people to spend more money. We’re asking them to spend more money on wine. And they’re getting handcrafted food and it’s all from scratch.

UP: Have you seen a slowing down of diners as more and more places have opened?
KJ: I’ll tell you that Vivace never did well in that location, ever. I mean, we lost money for years. We couldn’t ever make that restaurant feel like Vivace. Vivace Raleigh is 3,900 square feet with a 45-seat patio and Vivace there, you get like 30 people in the place, it’s lively, and Vivace means lively. You know, when we were at about maybe year six or seven, there was a woman who just ranted and ranted about Vivace in Charlotte about how disappointed she was. And she talked all about how her husband was supposed to take her to this hip Charlotte restaurant and he chose Vivace. And she was so excited. She saw the pictures online. Really, she got all dolled up and this is all her words, not mine. She got dolled up and was out for a night on the town in Charlotte and they went into Vivace there in Charlotte. And she said the bar didn’t have very many people in it, there were empty tables in the dining room. There were empty tables on the patio and there were empty tables upstairs. And she said, you were supposed to take me to a hip, cool super-popular restaurant. And he’s like, I did. And she’s like, this place is empty. We had 147 people seated when she said that.

We could never make it feel, you know, there’s a feel, right? There’s an energy. And we could never make Vivace Charlotte have that energy. We took tables out of the dining room, we put drapes up and shut the upstairs. You can look back through the reviews and they call it cavernous and gigantic and all that. And it just doesn’t feel the same.

UP: How will this change what you do next?
KJ: I would say that I’m not anti the Charlotte market at all. The concepts that we do well with, we have to be more careful about where we put them. And we have to be more careful about the size of the place we put them in. So all of the spaces that I’m looking at now are like 4,000 square feet.

And it’s a national trend as well, it’s not just me. That recession, it crushed a lot of people and we were in a very fortunate situation. The fact that we had other means of revenue, it didn’t just kill us. We were able to get lean and work through it and then come out the other side. A lot of people got really hurt and it woke a lot of people up. In addition to that, I also think that real estate’s becoming so expensive, I can’t take down a 6,500-square-foot space, outdoor dining and all that, because I’m going to need to do $5 million in sales. That’s $100,000 a week. You gotta be moving. And the places that try to do stuff like that are more like your steak houses. Your big ticket places. Vivace, we want to do great handcrafted pasta that was made today in a beautiful sauce, but we’re also gonna serve it for 16 bucks. We want you to come back because it’s Tuesday, not because it’s your anniversary.

UP: What number restaurant was Vivace for you? How are your other Charlotte restaurants, Bar Marcel and Civetta, doing?
Maybe six or seven. It was the first in Charlotte. Bar Marcel is really getting off to a hot start. We’re very thrilled with that. Civetta is taking longer to get established down there at Stonecrest, but it’s coming around. And probably most of that at the beginning was more because of the fact that we didn’t have the right chef in there and we didn’t have the right staff. And now it’s now it’s coming around, it’s getting much more recognition and getting more solid down there.