With ‘Instagrammable’ food concepts and vibe, The Place 2 Be’s Luari has major expansion plans for Hartford, elsewhere

Gjinovefa “Gina” Luari was only 24 when she opened The Place 2 Be restaurant on Franklin Avenue in Hartford.

The trendy restaurant serves brunch all day with colorful presentations amid vibrant, modern décor appealing to a younger sensibility.

Over the past two years, amid the pandemic, Luari opened two more restaurants, one in downtown Hartford and another in West Hartford’s Blue Back Square.

As many restaurants struggled and shuttered, Luari and her team maintained a focus on image and culture that, along with keen social media marketing, allowed The Place 2 Be to thrive.

Sales in 2021 jumped to $10 million, from $3 million a year earlier, Luari said. Now she has big plans to open five new restaurants in 2022, including one in New Haven, another in Springfield, and three more in downtown Hartford.

That would make her one of the Capital City’s most prolific restaurateurs.

Luari is betting big on downtown Hartford even as a series of new COVID-19 variants lend greater uncertainty as to when city-based companies will bring back more corporate workers.

But she isn’t just banking on the return of office workers who have long been the basis of downtown Hartford’s retail food chain.

“When people talk about the corporate workers, it’s frustrating, because it’s like they completely forget about the residents that live downtown,” Luari said. “And there is an immense amount of residents who live downtown, with new apartments opening every year — every month, actually.”

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HBJ PHOTO | STEVE LASCHEVER

Patrons frolic in clawfoot bathtub at The Place 2 Be in downtown Hartford.

“Instagrammable”

Each Place 2 Be has its own vibe and aesthetic, with slick but casual and fun ambiance. The downtown Hartford location has a deep clawfoot bathtub where customers can lounge and take photos.

Swinging chairs are suspended from the ceiling, while vines wrap around building supports. Most drinks come with small, yellow rubber ducks floating in them.

“My daughter probably has 50 of them at the house,” said David Griggs, CEO and president of the MetroHartford Alliance.

Griggs’ 7-year-old daughter orders a lemonade with every visit. It comes with strawberry and vanilla drizzle.

“Every time we go there it is an absolute experience,” Griggs said. “Everything that comes out of the kitchen is Instagrammable. The small details put into it is one of the things that make it successful. And the food is incredible.”

Lauri encountered a lot of doubts in the past few years, from lenders and potential landlords, said her mother, Marjana Luari.

Marjana Luari admits even she questioned her daughter’s decision to open her first restaurant on Franklin Avenue. Despite her misgivings, the elder Luari worked alongside her daughter to open and operate the venture. At first, it was just the two Luari women and two servers.

Six years later, Gina Luari’s company employs more than 100. By 2023, Luari anticipates more than 200 workers in eight restaurants.

Doubts have thinned considerably as The Place 2 Be boomed, with each location drawing lines hours-deep on weekends.

“She knows what she is doing, and she has shown she can do it over and over and over,” Marjana Luari said.

New concepts

Gina Luari, now 30, is preparing to open a new Place 2 Be restaurant at the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in early 2022, as well as another location at 338 Elm St., in New Haven, near Yale University.

She also hopes to open three new restaurants in Hartford outside the Place 2 Be brand in 2022.

Luari is in talks to open a new brick-oven pizza restaurant in a former city fire house at 275 Pearl St., where developer Joseph Klaynberg plans to redevelop the property into 40 apartments and 4,000 square feet of retail space.

Klaynberg is landlord to Luari’s existing Place 2 Be at 5 Constitution Plaza — a former hotel property that he and a partner converted into a mixed-use residential building with 194 apartments. Luari took over a ground-floor space in that building vacated by the failed Spectra Wired café.

Luari said she has also signed a lease for the former Dish Bar & Grill space in the Sage Allen apartment building at 900 Main St., which is also being redeveloped.

There, Lauri plans to open early in the new year a restaurant featuring Central and South American fare, a specialty of her culinary director, Xavier Santiago.

Luari is also in talks to open a “raw bar” seafood restaurant in the former V’s Trattoria space at 280 Trumbull St., right across from the Hartford Stage.

Luari said she plans to “lean heavily” into the burgeoning downtown population by cultivating a “hospitality ecosystem” of varied dining options.

Today, downtown hosts nearly 3,500 apartments with hundreds more in various stages of design and development.

City boosters aim to add at least 1,500 additional apartments. Getting to 5,000 units, they say, will create a critical mass of downtown dwellers who can support more restaurants and other merchants.

A different company culture

Luari credits her restaurant’s vibrant and welcoming vibe to her staff’s energy, creativity and caring. Employees at her downtown and West Hartford restaurants start at $12 per hour and share tips. This results in an average salary of $25 hourly, even for dishwashers, Luari said.

There’s no competition for tables or tips, allowing staff to focus on customers and mutual support, Luari said. Smart use of social media, especially Instagram, has been essential to Luari’s success.

Luari said she spends about $200,000 yearly on marketing, branding and outreach. She has one part-timer keeping track of the restaurants’ social media presence, and another who’s whole job is to create content for platforms like TikTok.

“Timing is everything, having a vision and being willing to take a risk,” said 36-year-old Andrea Jewell, Luari’s full-time director of culture and experience.

Jewell circulates among guests, keeping tabs on their experience. She also stays in constant touch with staff.

“How we feel as a unit directly impacts our guest experience,” Jewell said. “If you have an environment that is vibrant and high-energy, that’s what people feel when they come through the door.”

Jewell said the restaurant is on an endless marketing campaign, adapting with the times and ensuring word is out on relevant channels. Most customers are first-time visitors, she said. They come from as far away as Maryland, New Jersey and Philadelphia “because they saw us on TikTok,” Jewell said.

Jewell said Luari continued to push resources into marketing throughout the pandemic, even as many advised her to trim the expense.

“It was the smartest thing we could do because now we have lines out the door,” Jewell said. “Every Saturday and Sunday we have lines out the door.”

Hartford’s economic development officials say Luari’s restaurants have been a real shot in the arm during a tough period.

“It’s wonderful to have someone who seems to be a Houdini in being able to draw people to a facility,” Don Chapman, Hartford’s director of community and small business development, said of the downtown location. “I cannot believe the number of people who will come and stand in line over there.”

An immigrant origin

Luari works on the edge of modern American culture, but her work ethic and roots in the restaurant industry stretch more than 4,000 miles across the Atlantic to Albania.

Luari’s family fled the small Balkan nation to join her maternal grandfather in East Hartford in 1998. She was 6.

At the time, the country was disintegrating into lawlessness after a massive Ponzi scheme crashed the economy. Ordinary citizens raided government armories, making off with automatic rifles, grenades and other weapons.

Luari’s parents, Marjana and Ylli, sold the family restaurant and most of their possessions one day without telling anyone. They feared, with good reason, they would be kidnapped and robbed.

“We had to leave at 3 a.m.,” Luari said. “We had to sell our restaurant eight hours before we boarded a plane.”

The day after the family arrived in East Hartford, Ylli Luari began washing dishes at the Town Line Diner in Rocky Hill. He worked his way up to cook and, a decade later, bought the diner.

Gina and her siblings grew up around the diner. As a young teen, Gina Luari was regularly helping her parents fill out business forms. She redesigned the menu and launched a website. At 17, she drew up conceptual plans for an $80,000 renovation. At 19, Luari joined the Rocky Hill Chamber of Commerce, looking for ways to advance the diner.

“Our parents never let us forget how grateful we should be for these opportunities,” Luari said. “So, we definitely don’t let any of them pass us by.”

Luari was so active with the chamber that, at age 23, she was hired as its director.

It was on her commute from her Hartford apartment that she spotted a closed breakfast spot on Franklin Avenue. She hunted down the property owners and arranged a lease.

“There were so many Millennials moving into downtown,” Luari said. “I was like: ‘Where are all these people going to go?’ … When I opened The Place 2 Be, everyone else was leaving. I knew there was a need.”

Luari took out a $26,000 credit line and, with elbow grease volunteered by friends and family, remodeled the space into something that would appeal to her as a customer.

“Going out to eat is a sensory experience,” Luari said. “We just kind of created that. It led to being an Instagrammable space. So many people were taking pictures.”