StoneRose Owner Won't Let Fire Close His Restaurant

"...Watching my business burn."

As the owner of a restaurant, Brian Pieri is used to waking up early.

If an issue arises that requires him to come back after he leaves, he’ll get a late night call, usually around 1:30 or 2:30 a.m.

So when his phone went off on June 30, waking him up at 4:15 a.m., he wasn’t surprised until he looked at the clock.

“When I checked the time and looked at my phone and saw it was an 800 number calling me, I was half concerned and half pissed,” he said. “I was hoping it was some kind of automated Comcast call or something.”

The call was about the security system in his restaurant, . Two zones on the system had been triggered. One zone usually isn’t a big deal; just some water in the wires somewhere or a minor issue in the kitchen. For two zones, Pieri said, he flew out of bed.

“It took me less than five minutes to get to the restaurant and the fire guys were getting there as I got there,” he said.

At first, Pieri didn’t see anything wrong with the building. Then, when he opened the door and saw smoke coming out of the front of his restaurant, when the firefighters asked him to move aside and started to rush into his building near 9th Avenue and Fayette Street, he began to rationalize what was happening.

“I was thinking ‘OK, maybe I’ll just need to get the window fixed from where the fire department went in,’” he said. “But then it’s ‘now I see them sawing off the roof, now I see flames in the alley, now more fire guys are showing up.’”

Pieri ended up staying on the street for more than three hours while fire the Plymouth-Whitemarsh area worked to stop a kitchen fire in his restaurant, but the first hour, he said, was the hardest.

“I pretty much just stood there, emotionally overwhelmed,

"I built a restaurant I'd want to eat at."

The StoneRose restaurant opened at its 882 Fayette Street location in October 2009. For Pieri, the restaurant was the realization of a dream he cultivated while working in the financial arena. After graduating from Penn State with a focus on marketing and finance, the Conshohocken resident worked as a stockbroker for nine years before getting into the restaurant business.

“I wanted a restaurant and my lease was up, so I took a buyout and got out of brokerage,” he said. “I had the money. The space was open. It was at the top of 9th Avenue, my street, and I had a chef who had been in my ear about getting a place, so I took a stab at it.”

When Pieri opened the StoneRose, he wanted to create a place that could appeal to both halves of Conshohcken: the established old guard and its wave of new, younger professionals who had settled in the last decade.

“Conshohocken is one of the best towns, but it's also one of the hardest towns to read,” he said. “This town is not one thing, so the idea was to find something that works without losing half the town in the process.”

Not sure how his place would be received, Pieri said his aim with the StoneRose was to make a restaurant that straddled the line between the borough’s two halves, informed by what he wanted out of a dining experience.

“I’ve lived in Conshohocken for 10 years and I started to outgrow some places where I would eat and get drinks. With the Stone Rose, I thought that there had to be more people like me around here who would like another option, so my whole plan was to create a place that I would like to travel to in the city, here in town.”

"We feel like a neighborhood place."

Since 2009, Pieri said that the restaurant has been “very well accepted” by most of the community and that business has been better than he ever expected it to be. He credits this success to the restaurant’s focus on being “mature, but not too posh.”

“If you’re going out at midnight and there are 200 people pouring in, you’re looking for economic value, you’re looking for a DJ, you’re looking for 100 other people to hang out with,” he said. “We could turn up the music and bring in more of that demographic but that isn’t our focus. We wanted a place where a 35-year-old guy who wanted to get a glass of wine after dinner could come.”

Part of what Pieri calls the restaurant’s “tucked into the neighborhood feel” comes from its size. With an apartment above its dining room and another restaurant sharing the same building, the StoneRose isn’t able to host large parties the way some other places are. However, Piere has come to appreciate this characteristic of his restaurant.

“In the beginning, I saw it as a disadvantage, but now, I mean, there are some big places where you can go in on a Tuesday and it can look like a warehouse,” he said. “It’s hard not to stay busy with a place this size, and we feel like a neighborhood place.

The intimacy of the restaurant also allows Pieri and staff to apply their mantra, which is to give every customer a unique experience when they come in, he said.

“We try to be different in terms of what we like and not be different for the sake of being different,” he said. “I mean, I’m not a wine snob, but I felt all the options were very standard, the kind of thing that every restaurant or pub would have, so let’s bring in wines from Greece, from Spain, from France, Portuguese wine. Half the people, honestly, don’t even care, they just want what they usually have, but the other half likes being able to try something new, something they wouldn’t get someplace else.”

"The firefighters left ... and it was time to go to work."

After watching firefighters work on his restaurant for an hour, Pieri started to rebuild his restaurant.

“It’s a lonely feeling,” he said. “At 4:30 a.m., there are no friends to call. At first, I was paralyzed, but then things just started to go through my mind.”

Pieri began to go through a checklist. The residents of the apartment above his restaurant had gotten out of the place as he had arrived on the scene, so they would be OK. The insurance was paid up, so that was OK. It was time to start picking up glass.

“The firefighters left and, after 8:30, it was time to go to work cleaning up and planning to reopen,” he said.

Since June 30, Pieri has been working on getting his restaurant reopened. The experience has been both frustrating and humbling, he said.

“The community, the customers, the fire guys, they’ve all be fabulous,” he said. “We’ve had some trouble getting some things done, but they’re one-time frustrations. This isn’t like building an addition on a house. There are [things we need to do] but we can’t do them until we know the insurance claim is right. The borough wants everything set in stone, but I’ve got a restaurant to clean up with no roof on it.”

On August 15, the , bringing the Stone Rose, his restaurant, one step closed to reopening.”

“The plans are submitted, we have approval to do construction, we hope to have the final permits soon,” he said. “I think we’re looking at four or five weeks of hard work and another week to get the inside looking right, and hopefully we’ll be open again [in the fall].”