Daniel Rose, the American chef who achieved international acclaim with his first-ever restaurant Spring, has had a terrible year. When I interviewed him last December (see article here), he was full of optimism about a new space near the Louvre:

We’ll add a lunch service so that people can come more spontaneously. And we’ll add more staff, which will allow me to do things that are a little more creative than answering the phone. The idea is to reduce the frustrations so that the joy which is already here can have room to express itself more fully. I may be dreaming, but I think there’s a way to have a restaurant with both happy cooks and happy customers. Doesn’t everyone want to have fun?

While he could see the fun at the end of the tunnel, Rose never anticipated that opening the new space would be easy. But he couldn’t have predicted the volume of red tape required to rebirth Spring in the classified center. Any new restaurant in Paris is required to provide access for the disabled. But the city permits few, if any, structural changes to its protected buildings. Figuring out what they were supposed to do wasn’t easy for Rose and his team of architects. The plans have just now been approved, and Rose is forecasting an opening in March 2010 – fourteen months after our interview.

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