Steak and potatoes, in Avila’s unique style, now gone for goodThis note came in earlier this morning from sharp-eyed reader, Chris. It’s as simple, direct, and to the point as these kinds of things get:”Do you guys have any information re: Avila has closed its doors? I loved this place so if true, I’m very sad to see it go.”Sadly, Chris, I do have some information for you. As (very briefly) mentioned in Surly’s column yesterday (“Ventana is a Midget Orgy of Flavor”), Avila has, in fact, shut down. Sunday was the restaurant’s last day of service and, come Monday, the doors were locked and all the lights were dark.This hit Surly hard. He liked Avila, thought that the boys in the kitchen were playing around a little too much with the competing flavors, but had a lot of respect for chef Alex Pitts and the risks his kitchen was willing to take. He wrote about Avila just last month, giving it “7 Play-Doh colors out of 10″ which, for him, is a pretty good rating. Weird, but pretty good. Just like his mom.Because of the sudden closure (and the delay in getting the reservation system shut down), it took me a couple days to get Avila’s (now former) owner Jared Carpenter on the phone. But he and I finally got to talk this afternoon. And the one big question I had for him? Considering that Avila only managed to last nine months, what the fuck went wrong?”We got to a point where we just weren’t getting enough bodies in the door,” he told me. But that’s not really much of an answer. That’s like me asking a medical examiner why this guy over here died and the medical examiner telling me, “Well, his heart stopped beating.” Not getting enough people through the door is a cause, for sure. But I was looking for something more…definitive than that.”That’s the most frustrating part,” Carpenter explained, telling me all about the good reviews, the good reception he’d gotten in the neighborhood. “So many people left so happy. There was really nothing we could point to and say, ‘This is what’s going wrong. If we could just fix that.’ Honestly, I’m a little confused as well.”According to Carpenter it really was a simple question of math that killed Avila. It was a small space. The overhead wasn’t too bad. The restaurant could essentially support itself on a single turn of the floor. But the trick? It had to get that single turn every night, and there were several nights where it just didn’t happen.”It would be a consistent Tuesday night where we would do 10 people,” Carpenter told me. And that hurt. He said that, going into the summer, Avila was already in “pretty bad shape,” but everyone was hoping for things to turn around. “We needed the summer to get us going,” he said.But it didn’t work.”We made it about nine months,” Carpenter continued. “I take a lot of pride in that. We made it as far as we possibly could.” But in the end, the final closure was a sudden, surprising thing.”It was on its way,” he said. “It was definitely coming. I wanted to go until someone forced me to close, but then…”But then it just became too much. Avila served about 55 people on its last Sunday–not a bad night. But too many other really bad nights had already passed by, too many Tuesdays, too many nights where the kitchen served 10 dinners over the course of an entire shift. And Carpenter knew he was done.So right now, Avila is shuttered. Carpenter is looking for a buyer who could take over the space as a turn-key operation, but for his part, he’s out. Chef Alex Pitts, Carpenter thought, was probably headed back to Spring Hill (where he came from to help open Avila). And the rest of the staff?”They’re restaurant people,” he said. “They’re survivors.”Here’s hoping he’s right about that.