A legal battle over parking is delaying the opening of long-planned Thayer Street restaurant, Shark Sushi Bar and Grill, which was originally slated to open in December 2007.
According to Providence zoning ordinances, restaurants must provide one parking space for every four seats, meaning that the 131-seat Shark, to be located at 275 Thayer St., would have needed to find 33 spaces. But the zoning board found last May that providing the spaces represented a sufficient hardship for the owner, given that the property had no space for off-street parking, and relieved Shark from its obligation to provide parking.
Grant Dulgarian, a competing Thayer Street businessman and trustee for the Krikor S. Dulgarian Trust, which owns properties such as Avon Cinema, appealed the board's May decision.
In the appeal, filed with the Rhode Island Superior Court in June, Dulgarian argued that the zoning board's granting the variance to Shark was "arbitrary" and "capricious."
"There's already a parking problem on Thayer," Dulgarian told The Herald, adding that a new 131-seat restaurant with no additional parking would "exacerbate" the problem.
The nearest available space for parking was 1.2 miles away from Shark's location, making the requirement unfeasible, according to zoning expert Peter Casale, who testified to the zoning board on Shark's behalf at an April hearing. Several community members, including Dulgarian, spoke against granting Shark parking relief at that hearing.
"We knocked on pretty much every door" in search of suitable parking spaces, Casale said, according to a transcript of the hearing.
Ray Hugh, Shark's owner, said at the hearing that 80 percent of the restaurant's business would be students coming on foot, according to the transcript. He said he based that number on his experience at the two neighboring restaurants he owns, Shanghai and Extreme Pizza and Wings.
Hugh, who declined to comment for this article, told the zoning board last April that he had invested "well over $700,000" in Shark already.
But Shark's decision to seek a liquor license, which it was granted in the fall, contradicts the idea that 80 percent of the sushi restaurant's customers would be students, Dulgarian said. The liquor license will only increase demand for parking, he said.
The difficulty in finding suitable parking drives customers away from Thayer Street businesses, Dulgarian said. The College Hill Parking Task Force, of which Brown was a participant, found last spring that there was enough parking on the Hill, but that it needed to be better managed.
Hearings for the appeal are currently ongoing.
