The popular pasta restaurant on Mitchell Street is looking to extend its seating area into the basement of the Charles Rennie MacKintosh-designed lighthouse building.
Mitchell Street pasta restaurant Sugo has applied to Glasgow City Council to extend its seating area into the basement of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh-designed Lighthouse building, the ground floor of which already houses Sugo’s existing seating and kitchen space.
Sugo, established last year by the team behind Paesano pizza, originally seated up to 250 guests before Covid-19.
Management stated in their planning documents that the decision to expand was primarily an attempt to boost the available space for customers in order to make the business viable in a post-Covid-19 environment.
Social distancing is severely limiting customer numbers, and as a result is reducing the profit the restaurant can make in any one night. Any means by which the available floor space can be increased will be of great benefit to any business in the coming months.
In the planning documents submitted to the city council, Sugo states that the basement is currently not in use and would allow, if permission is granted, the restaurant to seat enough customers to offset the lost income from its long closure during lockdown and the reduced customers under current distancing rules.
Planning documents state: “Due in the main to the extraordinary situation presented by the Covid-19 pandemic, and the fact that the restaurant has been closed since early March, the applicant has had to consider a range of options aimed at sustaining the restaurant and ensuring the viability of the business.
“Through these considerations, it was felt that extending the business into the basement would provide for more generous preparation areas and an extra cooking area which would potentially increase the capacity of the kitchens, and in turn the volume of business which could be generated.
“The new cooking installation will be directly beneath the existing cooking installations on the ground floor with the new extraction system linked directly into the existing one, so there will be no issues with odours or fumes, or additional pipework.
“The proposed changes have no impact on or affect the external parts of the building and will have no impact on building regulation issues in particular escape from the premises in event of fire, which will continue to be via the existing escape corridor.”
The deadline for comment on the submitted documents was on 31 August, with a decision by the city council expected on 22 September.
