--- title: "The Most Important Person in a New Neighbourhood Runs Front of House" description: "Developers model rent, vacancy and cost. The tenant that makes or breaks a neighbourhood rarely shows up in the pro forma: the restaurant owner." last_updated: "2026-11-03" --- # The Most Important Person in a New Neighbourhood Runs Front of House The more I work with developers, the more projections I see. Projected yield from commercial tenants. Projected vacancy. Projected construction costs. A developer's whole job is to understand as many constraints as possible before anything gets built, so there are fewer surprises later. It's also why the developers who win the deals are often the ones who've been at it longest. They've seen the surprises, they know how to handle them, and the banks love them for it. Which helps. But there's one projection I see in spreadsheets and in renders that almost always gets underweighted. It's simple, and it can make or break a new neighbourhood. Who's running the best restaurant? ## What I took from Keith McNally I just finished Keith McNally's memoir, *I Regret Almost Everything*. It's a look behind the curtain at what it really takes to run a restaurant that matters, the kind that becomes part of a city's identity. > Without energy, people stay away. With the right energy, they show up in packs, for decades. Let me be clear about one thing. Living above a restaurant can be miserable. The floor shakes when the cleaning crew stacks chairs, the music runs late, the chatter never stops. I've never lived above one, but I've been part of the problem enough times to feel for the people who do. Living within throwing distance of a great restaurant is a different story. Eating together is one of the oldest things we do. It came long before cities, and it'll outlast whatever we build next. People come together to eat. If you're deciding what to build in a city, you can shorten that to "people come together." Or just: people. And a good restaurant draws a certain kind of people. Folks with enough income to eat out, who are social and part of the community. The same people who make good tenants. A great restaurant is one of the clearest signs a neighbourhood is hot, and one of the best signs it'll stay that way. Depending, you guessed it, on the owner. That's why developers pay attention when someone like McNally signs a lease. If he's opening on a corner, that corner is going to be busy. And a busy corner takes a lot of the unknown risk out of building next to it. ## How a restaurant becomes one line in a pro forma Here's the thing. When you break down what a building costs, a commercial tenant collapses into a single line item: rent. Can this tenant pay what I need to charge to hit my margins? Is the use allowed here? That's it. It could be a Starbucks or it could be Balthazar. A newer developer looks at those two options and picks the one with the least risk. The chain has a track record, so the odds they pay rent on time are high. The independent restaurant is an unknown. I think that's the wrong lens, and it's why so many new developments are missing a metric that can quietly cost them down the road. A developer building in an up-and-coming area isn't only thinking about rent in one building. They're trying to build a place. An environment that makes their next three projects possible. Sometimes that comes down to a single tenant, one restaurant owner. People walking by during the day. People staying late at night. That's lightning in a bottle, and it compounds a lot faster than a chain paying rent on time. It's riskier. It's also how the great cities built their identity. People want to be part of something. They don't want to live in a nameless place with nameless restaurants, and if they do, they don't stay long, because there's nothing to be attached to. ## Next time you look at a render I look at a lot of architectural renders. The first thing I do is take out all the people. Every one of those cut-out figures strolling past the ground floor needs a reason to be there. Something that pulls them in, and something that makes them stay. If you can't tell a story about why that person is on that sidewalk, you won't be able to sell the vision to the business owners you need on your side. So picture the render on a Sunday morning. Then on a Thursday night. If there's a restaurant on that ground floor, think about who owns it and why they're there. **They might be the most important partner of your career.** ## Sources 1. I Regret Almost Everything — Research · Keith McNally. ## Sitemap See the full [sitemap](/sitemap.md) for all pages.