What Running Restaurants Taught Paul Leongas About Commercial Construction

Paul Leongas

Here is something most commercial developers never experience: calling an emergency HVAC tech at 9 p.m. on a July Saturday because the dining room just hit 94 degrees and there are 200 people inside.

Paul Leongas has made that call. More than once. Over 25 years of operating a restaurant across Schaumburg, Edison Park, and Skokie, he dealt with every mechanical failure, building code headache, and infrastructure surprise a commercial tenant can face. Those were not abstract problems. They were Friday-night-with-a-full-house problems, and they came with real financial consequences. A broken HVAC system on a Saturday night does not just make people uncomfortable. It empties the dining room. A plumbing backup during service does not just require a plumber. It requires a refund for every table in the building.

The education was brutal and specific. A grease trap that is undersized by 20 gallons backs up during peak service. An electrical panel specced for retail cannot handle restaurant equipment loads. A kitchen exhaust system that works fine for 50 covers fails at 150. Paul Leongas learned that commercial spaces are designed for average use, and restaurants are never average. They run at extremes. Peak hour means every burner lit, every oven running, every cooler cycling, and a full dining room generating body heat that the HVAC was not designed to offset.

When he launched Axis Development Group LLC in Park Ridge, Illinois, that pain became an advantage. Paul Leongas builds commercial spaces now, and every one of them is informed by what went wrong in the spaces he occupied as a tenant.

Take kitchen layout. Most developers hand that off to an architect who has never worked a service. Paul has. He knows that the distance between the grill station and the pass window determines how fast food moves. He knows where the dishwasher needs to go relative to the bus station. He knows that walk-in cooler placement can save or waste 15 minutes per shift in unnecessary steps. Multiply that wasted time by two shifts a day, seven days a week, for 12 years, and the cost of a bad floor plan becomes obvious.

Take mechanicals. Paul self-performs construction through Axis, and he specs HVAC, plumbing, and electrical based on actual operational loads, not theoretical ones. He has seen what happens when a landlord installs the cheapest rooftop unit available. It works for two years and then it does not. The tenant pays the price in emergency service calls, lost revenue during shutdowns, and eventually a full replacement out of their own pocket because the lease says the landlord is not responsible for tenant equipment.

Take the lease itself. Paul operated each Curragh location for approximately 12 years. That means he lived with the consequences of every construction decision in his buildings for over a decade. A five-year punch list of problems teaches you exactly what not to do when you are the one building the space. A 12-year punch list teaches you twice.

The pub earned the Guinness Gold Standard Award for the Perfect Pint in 2002. That kind of recognition requires obsessive consistency. The same obsessiveness shows up in how Paul Leongas approaches commercial development through Axis. No shortcuts on mechanical systems. No cheap finishes to pad margins. No detail left to the next guy.

Most developers build for the pro forma. Paul Leongas builds for the person who has to work in the space every day. That is the difference 25 years of restaurant operations makes.