Owners seek to Shore up 114 additional restaurant seats

Two-hundred-and-ninety-nine seats.

That’s what restaurant owners Mark Caragiulo and Tom Leonard are seeking for a new Longbeach Village restaurant at the former Moore’s Stone Crab Restaurant, which they purchased for $3.2 million last month. The restaurant will be similar to their Shore Diner on St. Armands Circle.

That’s 114 more seats than the 185 seats currently approved. They are seeking the extra seats as part of a plan “for a banquet suite for private parties located on the second floor,” according to a July 28 site plan application.

Sarasota land-use agent Peter Dailey said Village residents shouldn’t focus on the number 299.

“It’s still a 185-seat restaurant,” Dailey said. “The extra seats on the second floor will only be used maybe one weekend a month or once a week when a special event is booked.”

Caragiulo and Leonard seek both a parking waiver and parking flexibility to accommodate nearly 300 seats as part of a new two-story restaurant. The site currently has 75 parking spaces.

Asked what she thought about the application July 31 regarding the number of seats being sought, Planning, Zoning and Building Director Alaina Ray said, “I was shocked.”

Testimony at public meetings last summer and even this year regarding a request to change the restaurant's zoning from residential to commercial — which was approved — included comments from former Moore’s co-owner Alan Moore and Dailey, stating that the new owners didn’t have plans to increase the number of seats in the restaurant.

Included as part of the site plan and special exception applications are the minutes from a Nov. 17, 2014 neighborhood workshop that members of Longbeach Village attended at Moore’s to hear about future plans.

Notes from that meeting state: “Mr. Moore and Mr. Dailey stated the restaurant will stay at 185 seats, which is the current permitted seating and that renovations will stay within the footprint of the current building.”

Dailey said the restaurant will mostly continue to operate at 185 seats.

“The restaurant is in bad shape,” Dailey said. “The only way to fix it is to tear it down and rebuild it, and that’s why we can’t keep the current footprint.”

Leonard told the Longboat Observer the extra seats are needed to accommodate a meeting/event crowd he can’t host on St. Armands.

“We have to call these seats according to the town code, but they're not really additional seats,” Leonard said. “We have to include them to get the special event traffic our customers want. We might only use the space 50 days out of the year for private events.”

“We have enough parking on site to meet the 299-seat parking requirement,” Leonard said. “We’re sensitive to the residents that live there and will use valet and other methods to take care of any issues.”

Village residents who were informed of the application Tuesday, though, were surprised to hear about the plans.

“It’s absurd, and it’s alarming,” said Lands End resident and District 5 Commissioner Pat Zunz. “I’m confident planning staff will work through this application with the applicants. They better straighten up and fly right because that won’t be approved here.”

“Oh my God,” said Village resident Kip O’Neill. “It’s unfeasible for the Village. It’s not only shocking but appalling people have the nerve to submit something that would so drastically alter our way of life.”

A Development Review Committee meeting will be scheduled for the applicants and planning staff at the end of the month to review the applications. 

A Planning and Zoning Board hearing on the application could be scheduled for October if the application is deemed complete.

Resident Michael Drake said the Village “better bond together real quickly” in the fall.

“They better rent out a bigger room to accommodate all of us for our public comments because Villagers will go ballistic,” Drake said.