Kitchen Consigliere Kickstarter

What do you do when you're about $25,000 short of bringing your dream restaurant to life, but the bank won't grant you a loan?

Well, in this day and age, you plead your case publicly—and that's exactly what Kitchen Consigliere chef-owner Angelo Lutz is doing.

Lutz has launched a crowd-sourcing campaign to help get his new location on the corner of Haddon and Collings in tip-top shape. 

In an e-mail campaign that launched Monday, the restaurateur continued to trade on his checkered past. 

The appeal to patrons describes how "the fast life, sports gambling and the mob life" that earned Lutz a nine-year federal prison sentence is also keeping him from getting approval on bank loans.

"When is your debt to society paid?" Lutz told Patch. "When is enough enough? How many pounds of flesh do I have to give for my sins?

"Rather than break the law or borrow street money from loan sharks to do this, I did it sort of an unconventional-conventional way," Lutz said.

Even if he fails to secure the additional funds through donations, Lutz said he will still be able to open the new location in his current financial condition, just not as elaborately as he'd planned.

"We have a three-phase plan to open up the restaurant," he said. "We have ways of doing it, and it’s designed to how we want to ideally open up. If we can’t do it that way, we have a second and a third phase, but we’re building a foundation of what we really need to do."

The extra cash is needed, Lutz said, to correct some issues with the layout of the kitchen and the equipment that he's inheriting from the previous owners of Knight's Bistro, into which his restaurant is moving. 

Once the funds are secured, he said, the restaurant will be able to roll out three different themes within its walls, completing his vision for a high-end dining experience.

Plus, at different levels of donations, patrons earn different give-backs from the restaurant. 

At the low end, a $25 pledge earns a sausage meatball appetizer; write a check for $1,000 and you get a sit-down dinner for six with Lutz at the chef's table of the new location.

"My diners obviously love my restaurant; they keep coming back," Lutz said. "We want to give all those loyal people an opportunity to say they’re helping me, but they’re not helping me and giving me a handout, we’re giving them something in return.

"I’m kind of like getting loans from my customers," he said. "$1,000 for 6 people at this consigliere’s table is going to cost $500 at least in food."

Lutz said that for any who doubt his funding sources, he'll happily to put copies of the canceled checks on his website "and people will see where it came from.

"They want to keep judging me, and we’re putting full disclosure," he said.

"I’ve brought some notoriety to the community; the community’s helped me prosper," Lutz said. "I’m not just opening up a restaurant, we’re opening a dining experience."