Blue Plate Oysterette, a seafood restaurant on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, bustled with activity on a recent afternoon. Most of its guests flocked to the tables set up on the parklet straddling the sidewalk, their gazes skipping over four lanes of traffic to absorb the views of the nearby beaches.
“It’s the preferred seating,” said Brett Story, the restaurant’s general manager. “Right now, I have two tables (in use) inside, and I have 13 tables outside.”
The parklet — a makeshift platform that encompasses curbside parking spots in front of the restaurant — was set up in 2020, when the dine-in options were obliterated by the pandemic.
“You can only survive so much on to-go food before you really need sustainable dining to pay the bills,” Story said. “So when (Gov.) Gavin Newsom allowed for parklet dining, it really saved the day and really helped us to get through the pandemic and then to be able to flourish after.”
Blue Plate Oysterette’s parklet permit, issued under the city’s fee-free pilot program, was set to expire in September, and the restaurant was quick to reapply. The process, according to the city, included paying $1,672 in plan check and inspection fees, a $358 fee for a propane heater, a $1,358 wastewater fee for each new seat the restaurant added, as well as a $2.23-per-square-foot monthly license fee to operate the parklet in public right of way. The business also had to come up with $3,500 for a security deposit.
“It’s definitely worth it for the look of the restaurant, for the sheer ability to increase the size of the restaurant, and be able to create some revenue, to keep creating jobs,” he said. “There’s also the curb appeal … folks, when they walk by, they see people having a drink, having oysters, having fun, listening to music, and that attracts them to come in.”
Municipalities across the Los Angeles County are revising the lax emergency regulations that enabled proliferation of alfresco dining when Covid-19 was in full swing. In most cases, the new ordinances dictate the look and placement of outdoor seating and call for multiple fees. Some businesses, like the Blue Plate Oysterette, are able to absorb the cost to comply, while other eateries had to relinquish their outdoor seating due to financial constraints.
The change
Long Beach restaurants — more than 100 of them — had until the end of January to reapply for a permit to keep their outdoor dining spaces. The Long Beach City Council, responding to calls to reclaim the lost parking spots and public sidewalks, last year voted to implement a permanent parklet permit, which is “extremely difficult to get,” according to Ciaran Gough, owner of The 908, a California-themed eatery that was less than a year old when the pandemic hit.
“There’s a lot of eliminators; you can’t be in the coastal zone because you’ve got to wait on the Coastal Commission (approval) and it takes one to two years,” he said, adding that the cost of the parklet construction can run between $20,000 to $40,000 and that the design must comply with city standards.
“The (temporary) program was a godsend during the pandemic,” Gough said. “I know a lot of the restaurateurs who wanted to keep them …We did not apply for the permanent parklet because of the difficulty, cost, and feasibility of the program.”
He added that the parklet issues cropped up on Belmont Shore’s Second Street.
“It’s a popular place for people to go dine and shop, and many of the residents were in favor of parklets, but some kicked up some stink about it, saying they took away parking…. but parking’s been a nightmare there for 30 years, and people use Uber and things like that, so you almost got less people driving down there.”
For survival
Gough’s restaurant is located at the Long Beach Exchange, and its back patio overlooks the shopping and dining center’s communal area. During the pandemic, he set up additional seating around the restaurant’s patio, which spilled over to the adjacent Orangetheory Fitness location in the evenings.
“They were only doing classes in the daytime, so we worked out with them where (they could) do summer classes on our patio, and then at night we would set up a temporary patio in front (of their door),” he said. “We probably added about 50 to 55 seats.”
The move enabled Gough to survive the tough times, and then some.
“We still were about half the seating capacity of what we normally had with indoor and our current patio, but we actually got our sales up to match what we were doing pre-pandemic,” he said. “Not everybody was that fortunate. Some people could only add 12 or 14 seats or had restrictions. We were fortunate to be able to add that many.”
Gough, who named his restaurant after the first three digits of the eatery’s Long Beach ZIP code, invested about $10,000 to expand the outdoor seating he had to remove by January.
“I spent money on plants and a roll-out TV and things of that nature,” he said. “And at first, we did a lot of lounge furniture, but we then discovered people want to dine and we brought out our indoor tables out there. So for us, yes, we lost the money on what we paid to set up that area, but some of my friends invested $20,000 to $30,000 on building an actual deck or a parklet and they had to take it out.”
Beverly Hills-based FAT Brands Inc., whose roster of franchises includes Johnny Rockets and Fatburger, has about 75 restaurants in Los Angeles. Its chair and founder, Andy Wiederhorn, compared outdoor dining to a “the gift that keeps on giving to restaurant operators” because it provides them with more capacity, while guests like to be outside, “especially in California where the weather’s great.”
“It’s really been nothing but a positive,” he added. “We’ve seen some cities cut back on the amount of tables they’ll allow street-side versus back of the building, in the parking lot, which is unfortunate … West Hollywood is pushing back on the restaurants that were in the streets. I think Beverly Hills has been fine with sidewalks, but I don’t think they’re doing the streets anymore.”
Welcoming approach
The city of Los Angeles, meanwhile, is taking a more welcoming approach. Its revised Al Fresco Ordinance — which got a nod from the City Planning Commission in April and awaits adoption by the Los Angeles City Council and mayor — allows outdoor dining where restaurants are permitted without requiring planning approval, so applicants can go straight to obtaining building and safety permits. It also removes zoning limitations that restrict the amount of space a restaurant can devote to seating patrons outdoors on private property and allows operators to repurpose any amount of parking spaces for outdoor dining. The ordinance also contains several “good neighbor” policies regarding hours of operation and maintenance requirements.
Outdoor dining applications that concern public spaces such as streets and curbside parking spots are reviewed by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. Parklets must be designed in a way that allows easy disassembly to accommodate construction or utility work. The application fees range from about $3,000 for existing participants to $4,000 for the new applicants. The restaurant owners must also have general liability insurance of $1 million per occurrence.
The array of regulations did not surprise Jot Condie, president and chief executive of the California Restaurant Association.
“Every city is different, and I guess that’s the way it should be,” Condie said. “During the pandemic, to allow the outdoor dining — whether it’s a parklet or tables on the sidewalk — they just cut through all the red tape to make it happen, and it worked. Now that the emergency regulations have sunsetted in many cases, they’re trying to figure out (how to) default back to the current process.”
He added that “most restaurateurs, especially the small independent restaurants, they’re still digging out from the pandemic-era debt, and it’s going to take years for many of them to crawl out of it. And so, if (outdoor dining) can help them stay afloat, if it helps increase their business, then that’s a good thing, because we all want these neighborhood restaurants to survive.”
