The Manhattan Beach City Council approved an encroachment permit that allows retractable awnings at the Strand House restaurant at its Tuesday night meeting, bringing up thorny questions about coastal views and intensification of use in the downtown area that had been part of recent discussion of the Downtown Specific Plan.
The decision allows the upscale eatery to install retractable awnings over its twin upper-level dining patios, which extend approximately five fit out over the sidewalk. Those patios were approved by the council in 2011, when the restaurant opened, with a separate encroachment permit.
Awning permits typically do not go all the way to the council; they are handled administratively by the city’s Community Development Department. But in this case, the 2011 council resolution allowing upper level dining specifically prohibited further intensification of use on the structures, prompting the restaurant to return.
Complicating the decision was the approval, at the previous council meeting, of the Downtown Specific Plan, a master zoning document for the neighborhood. Discussion of the plan was dominated by residents criticizing a portion of the plan that would have allowed commercial tenants in a wide swath of downtown to apply for use permits for second-floor outdoor dining, and the council ultimately jettisoned the provisions, replacing it with a flat ban on upper-level al fresco eating.
That Strand House’s outside tables are protected from the ban as a nonconforming use, and the ban leaves them as the only second-floor outdoor dining option in the city.
Sunshine is both the attraction and the difficulty of the outdoor tables: restaurateur Michael Zislis, whose Zislis Group operates the Strand House, said that seats on the two patios are the most sought-after tables in the establishment, but that at certain times of year and times of day sitting at they become uncomfortably hot.
Over the last year, restaurant staff have dealt with the issue by putting umbrellas out on the patios. But Zislis said that lugging the umbrellas to the second-floor is cumbersome and work-intensive for his staff, and would prefer to have the option for awnings.
Council members initially latched onto the proposal because of the prospect that the awnings, which in renderings were narrow and unobtrusive, would provide clearer coastal sight lines than the umbrellas. Mayor pro tem David Lesser showed the council a photo he took over the weekend of a street-level, daytime view of Manhattan Beach Boulevard: for a westerly vista, portions of the pier and Pacific Ocean are cluttered in canvas.
But the effort faltered when it became clear that Zislis’ proposal was not a neat substitution. He worried that at certain angles of incidence the awnings would not be able to provide enough protection, and wanted to still be able to use umbrellas if needed.
Councilmembers blanched at the prospect of having both awnings and umbrellas deployed at the same time, citing concerns raised in the recent discussion of the Specific Plan. The final draft of that document included a map of areas eligible for second-floor outdoor dining; although then-existing rules did not limit outdoor dining at all, residents worried that the permit process would be easily overwhelmed by eager restaurateurs, and could set the stage for far more upper-level eateries.
Objections to outdoor dining centered around noise, but also tapped into broader concerns about “intensification” of the downtown area: a feeling any expansion of the practice would further burden the city’s residents, especially those living adjacent to downtown. With these sentiments fresh in mind, the awning proposal became, in effect, a debate over whether added structures would exacerbate these impacts, and how much freedom business owners should have to address the situation.
“The question is, does this intensify use?” Lesser asked at Tuesday’s meeting.
Lesser was on the city’s Planning Commission in 2011 when that body approved the restaurant’s initial request for an encroachment. At the time, Lesser said, the proposal called only for plants on the upper-level patio, not the dining tables that the city council eventually approved. On Tuesday, he pointed out that the umbrellas would not be allowed if they were at street level. He called for a resolution that would allow for the awnings and prohibit use of the umbrellas, but allow Zislis to return to the council to seek umbrellas in the future.
It won the initial approval of council, but the vote was retracted when councilmembers and City Attorney Quinn Barrow began discussing exactly what the motion contained. A majority of the council, some of whom expressed a fondness for dining at the Strand House tables at issue, wanted to give the restaurant discretion to use the umbrellas in instances when the awnings did not provide sufficient cover.
The final motion passed, 3-2, and allows the restaurant to install the retractable awning, and to deploy it or umbrellas, but not both at the same time.
Councilmember Wayne Powell joined Lesser in dissent on the final motion. Powell said that previous instances of giving establishments discretion on how to comply with aspects of city code meant that the provisions were frequently ignored altogether. He said that the decision was “disrespectful to the community” given the comments about the Specific Plan, and predicted that the decision, among the last items discussed at the meeting, would generate outrage among residents.
“I have seen this situation where it’s left to employees so many times. And with employee turnover, they don’t get the message,” Powell said. “If you are relying on employees, I guarantee you’ll end up with heaters, awnings and umbrellas.”
