CLIP: They Flooded My Entire Restaurant, Took Me 8 Months to Rebuild! Jun Tanaka

0:00Olly Fawcett:In 2022, I believe you had a pretty serious fire at the restaurant. Is that right? Explain what happened. I've seen a few articles about it, but it seemed like a pretty devastating thing for the business. And you obviously just explained that you maintained a star in that year that you had the fire. Yes. Is that right? So what happened? What is the story there in the restaurant? What went down? So I got a call. i was in italy at the time and i i came back and it was in july 2022 and then i get a call around two o 'clock three o 'clock in the morning and then i pick up and i'm slightly annoyed and he says oh it's alan from the fire brigade do you own 22 charlotte street and as soon as i hear that i just feel sick and i said yes i do and he said look you've had a fire you need to come in how long is it going to take you and then i said to him look just give me an hour and then my wife is what's happened and i said we've had a fire and she's like oh my god do you want me to come with you and i said no just you know if it's burned down there's nothing we could do anyway did you have no idea what actually happened from the phone call they didn't tell you much no they said that no one's been hurt okay that you've had a fire thank god it's yeah it's it's been kind of handled right and you need to come in so i didn't know the extent of the damage at that time and i remember yeah having a shower having a coffee thinking i'm not going to rush because because there was nothing i could do and i needed to kind of calm down because i knew that if i'd rushed yeah i would be in the wrong kind of frame of mind by the time i get there jumped in an uber down to charlotte street there's two fire engines 20 firemen and then alan meets me and then he takes me through the building and the fire happened in the kitchen which is on the top floor right and basically what had happened there's a charcoal oven and it's placed next to the outer wall and what happened was there was a heat transfer over years slowly to the outside of the building where there was a window yeah and the wooden frame yeah and it was on the day that there was 40 degree heat it was in july 2022 and there was two days is like 38 degrees and then the wooden frame of the window spontaneously combusted at like one in the morning so that's not even when the sun's coming into the building it's just all of a sudden yep wow fuck but it's like that's terrifying yeah it is but it's super lucky because it was on the outside of the building and there was some couple walking past looked up saw the fire and then called the fire brigade and how big was the fire the fire was just on this whole side of that wall where the oven is yeah the window right because there's it had been closed off because it's the kitchen don't need it yeah and then the tim so it was the timber frame of the window was was a light and then the um they got the call and they were there seven minutes later seven minutes wow because it's on shaftsbury avenue the um the fire brigade and um the way they put out the the fire was they broke a hole in the roof and flooded the whole building what yeah they so they went onto the roof yeah and just pumped water into the whole building yeah and then flooded the whole building so when i arrived from the ground there was so much water it was dripping through the ceilings and they had put sandbags on the stairs to stop the water coming down the stairs like a like a waterfall and then alan walked me through the building and then we got to the kitchen it's like smell of smoke and there's a big hole in in the roof