We just signed the escrow paperwork today. We should be taking over day-to-day operations some time in the next few weeks, once we're done inspecting the equipment and so on. It will take a quite a bit of time beyond that to get all of the permits transferred, but wheels are in motion.
Fear not: whatever else we do, we will always continue to sell pizza there, late into the night. Because not doing that would be crazy.
Initially, the pizza place and DNA Lounge will continue to be separate operations, but the long term goal (and, if you've been following along for any length of time, you know that anything involving permits is a "long term goal") is to do a lot merger so that the two rooms are technically one business. This will enable us to poke a door in the wall and operate the restaurant side of things as basically "room three" of DNA Lounge. To accomplish that, we'll need to alter our existing liquor license to cover both rooms. That will allow us to operate the pizza place as either a continuation of whatever event is happening in the big room, or as a bar with its own completely separate event in there.
One of the limitations of DNA Lounge has always been that it's hard to do small events here. It's a very big room, and hard to sub-divide, so it is hard to make it work for live music with fewer than a couple hundred attendees. Having a smaller room in which it is possible to do live music in the 40-60 attendance range will let us say "yes" to people a lot more often...
A close reading of the above will tell you that I'm going to be spending a lot of the next year talking to lawyers and sitting in hearing rooms.
I am reminded of the immortal words of Patrick Swayze in Point Break: "You're about to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. How do you feel about that?"
