Parking:  

Although the restaurant plans are not final,  the maximum number of seats approved by the Planning Board is 156.   By way of comparison this restaurant will be the fourth biggest restaurant in town behind the Colonial Inn (304 seats), Paparazzi (about 225 seats) and Chang An (186 seats).   Many other restaurants in town are in the 90-125 seat range, including Vincenzo’s, The Ninety Nine, Bondir and Serafina’s.    The restaurant has 20 private parking spots in its parking lot adjacent to the building (some on the west side of the building and some on the east side).

In the Fall of 2013, there was a series of public meetings with the Town Planning Board and the Zoning Board of Appeals where the parking situation was discussed extensively.  Ultimately, both the Planning Board and the ZBA voted unanimously to provide relief to the required parking for our business.  The reason for their decision was primarily due to the fact that there are 435 parking spaces in the parking lot directly behind our building that are for the most part unused in the evenings and on weekends when we believe customer demand will be highest.  Many of those spaces are town-owned (the remainder are owned by the MBTA) and many of the town-owned spots have a three-hour maximum time limits, so cannot be used by commuters to Boston.  Also, we understand that the town plans to build approximately 50 additional new spaces in that lot in the next few years.

This large parking lot starts to empty out in the late afternoon and by the evening and on weekends the lot is almost empty.  We were asked by the Town Boards to actively communicate to our customers that the best place to park is in that parking lot and we will be building a lighted walking area for customers to use to pass from the back of our lot, over the train tracks into the commuter lot (which is already well lit at night).  This parking lot is not for the exclusive use of our restaurant, these town spaces can be used by anyone wishing to visit West Concord and they are very convenient to our building.

There is an educational process that will be necessary to have customers understand that this lot is likely the most convenient parking for our restaurant.  We will be including this information on our web site and in various places in our building.   We also anticipate that many of our customers will be arriving by train (commuters), via bikes (using the streets or the new BFRT path), and on foot as there are many residences and businesses within a short walk from our building.

Are We Serving Lunch?  

When we first open, we plan to serve only dinner and Sunday brunch for a while.  After we get the kinks out and are confident in our service, we will add a Saturday lunch/brunch, then maybe Friday lunch, and potentially on other weekdays as well.   Some people have expressed concern about weekday lunch as far as parking is concerned, however, others haveexpressed a need for more lunch options in the Village and some have said that they would love to see more people in West Concord at lunch time as they may shop at the other businesses while there.  We plan to evaluate along the way and see how it is going before making determinations on whether and when we will open for lunch.