Site Reconnaissance | Bandra West Cafe Shell Scored 6.8 of 10 Before the Lease

Everyone who walked past this unit liked it. Ground floor on a shopping street in Bandra West, an old building with character, a well-known burger brand next door, and specialty coffee names within a short walk. The brand's team had already pictured the counter. Our job was to walk in with a checklist instead of a picture, and tell them what the unit would actually cost to turn into a cafe.

Why survey a site that everyone already likes?

Because liking a site is a footfall judgement and building a cafe is a services judgement. A coffee bar needs water in, waste out, exhaust, power for chillers and a machine, and a frontage that will carry a sign for years. None of that is visible from the pavement. In Mumbai's older buildings it is often missing, and the lease makes whatever is missing your problem. We run the same 34-point site survey before any fit-out we plan to build ourselves, so the report is the first page of the project, not a separate opinion.

How did the location score?

We score six parameters from 1 to 10 and write the observation next to the number.

Overall: 6.8 out of 10, moderately favourable. Read alone, that number would have said proceed. The structural score said something else, and it is the one that costs money.

What did the 34-point walk find?

The shell had good bones. Walls sound, no cracks, one wall tiled, mezzanine flooring good with about 11 feet of height, wiring already run in conduit, a single main entry that is easy to monitor, and the paperwork the brand needed (OC, floor plan, share certificate, municipal registration) all in place. Then the services.

1. No internal water connection. Water was being filled through a pipe at the left of the entrance into a basement void that once held a tank. No tank now. Beverage prep, cleaning and dishwashing would run on manual refilling until a line, a tank and a pump were built.
2. No drainage line, for the unit or the toilet. Nowhere for waste water from the counter or the kitchen to go. That is a sump, a pump and a municipal connection before interior work can start.
3. Open rain drain directly in front of the door. The frontage smelt on the day of the visit. No interior design fixes a smell at the entrance.
4. No cross ventilation. No second opening and no wall that could take one. The store would run hot, AC tonnage goes up, and kitchen exhaust needs a fresh-air path that does not exist.
5. Frontage in poor repair. Shutter jammed and rusted; signage base was wooden planks on a damaged aluminium frame; a rat hole beside the water pipe into the basement; the shutter gap needed sealing; the external wall needed finishing; no ground space for an AC outdoor unit.

Each finding was photographed and circled so that the brand and the landlord would be looking at the same thing when they talked. The washroom was inside the building, shared between three tenants, which is both a licence question and a customer experience question.