Photograp by David Torrence
Dr. Gurpreet Padda still has the original flyer from GP Enterprises, the construction company he founded at age 14, the summer before he entered Parkway North High School. Back then, his criterion for hiring an employee was “Can you drive?” After school, Padda had to be picked up and driven from job to job; he supervised everything from walking dogs to remodeling basements. “Install roof turbines? Well, of course we do that…”
Such resourcefulness has led to his success as a physician and his eventual reputation as a serial entrepreneur. Shuttering GP Enterprises when he entered medical school at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, Padda eventually became board-certified in pain medicine and anesthesiology, establishing the Padda Institute in 2001.
Ami Grimes is the CEO of the Padda Institute and the real serial entrepreneur, says Padda. The self-proclaimed “patron saints of lost real-estate causes” also develop local restaurants and the vertical integration that supports them. Café Ventana and Sanctuaria are already established. On deck are Diablito’s Cantina and Hendricks BBQ & Moonshine Blues Bar—the latter a 17,000-square-foot multilevel restaurant in St. Charles’ former Water Works building. And scheduled to open in 2012 are DiSilvio’s (an Italian eatery next to Ventana) and a brewpub (with a steak and lobster focus, no less) at the duo’s Cathedral Square Brewery.
The partners have made developing restaurants look almost easy. For Sanctuaria’s decor, they commissioned a famous folk artist from a local flea market. At Diablito’s, Padda had dozens of tin chandeliers inexpensively replicated from one that he sourced in Morocco. Padda also transformed retired Mexican highway signs into tabletops.
Recycled materials are a hallmark of the duo. At Hendricks, a template chair was purchased for $150 and sent to Rajasthan, India, with tons of reclaimed barn wood acquired in France. Six hundred replicas were made and delivered for $50 each, sparing the landfill and saving Hendricks $60,000.
Padda gives Grimes most of the credit, praising her ability “to envision an entire project after a 1-minute tour.” Padda’s strength is making those thoughts economically viable. Through contacts and unique sourcing, he can outfit a restaurant for less than competitors—financing it through cash flow, not debt.
The partners believe vertical integration is essential to their ultimate success. At one farm, they’re experimenting with aquafarming. Another, Foundations Farms in Belleville, Ill., was acquired to supply organic produce, fruit, eggs, cheese, and eventually other proteins for their growing list of restaurants. Expecting a massive uptick in the prices of foodstuffs, they feel the farms will be one key to survival.
Their integration extends far beyond food, however. In the building next to Café Ventana is iNeoCortex—what Padda describes as “the new brain,” an incubator for “nimble, app-based companies.” (Padda and Grimes have an interest in such a company, Deal Current, an enterprise that gives businesses the tools to compete with companies like Groupon and whose sales quickly rose from $4,000 to $450,000 per month, says Padda.) iNeoCortex is housed in a renovated space that is texturally deep, like their other projects. There, Padda and Grimes plan to nurture other low-cost/high-yield companies that, as Padda puts it, “will flower in the cross-pollination.”
