Montauk Smiley Face Motel 86s Restaurant, And Finally Serves Something Planning Board Can Swallow

The owners of Hero Beach Club in Montauk have abandoned their nearly five-year effort to win permission for a small restaurant inside the hotel, opting instead to create a simple basement kitchen that would provide room service to guests.

In doing so, the hotel appears to have finally won the support of the members of the town’s Planning Board, who for years had repeatedly batted back the efforts of the hotel’s representatives to make the case for creating other iterations of food service at the property.

At the first discussion of the project in two years, consultant Britton Bistrian told the board that Hero Beach Club is now asking only for permission to create a 1,000-square-foot kitchen in the basement of the hotel, add a 515-square-foot deck to the hotel’s second floor, create three new parking spaces and install two new nitrogen-reducing septic systems.

She said the hotel would have no formalized or furnished dining area, and that there would be no food service to members of the public not staying as guests at the hotel.

The express exclusion of the public — which the previous restaurant proposal had not offered — proved to be a key component in the view of Planning Board members.

“We were envisioning people coming in, having drinks, having a party … bedlam,” Planning Board member and Montauk resident Lou Cortese said at the March 23 board meeting. “I think the plan you are submitting now severely curtails that.”

The kitchen could be used to cater large weddings and other events at the property, Bistrian noted, but those would each have to have specifically issued special event permits granted by the committee appointed by the Town Board to review all such gatherings.

Throughout the years-long wrangling over the hotel’s efforts to add food and drink service to its amenities, the proposal was bogged down in the fears of planners that allowing even a tiny restaurant at a hotel with expansive decking and lawn space would open up the property to become the latest party scene in Montauk and in the hurdles of parking requirements at a property that has only a fraction of the dedicated parking that would be required under current codes.

When Hero Beach Club first came to the Planning Board in 2017 — a year after the former Oceanside Resort was purchased by the current owners, and the iconic smiley face was painted on its eastern exterior giving a sassy wink — the proposal was for a takeout style food and drink bar. Within months the town proposed and adopted legislation that expressly prohibited precisely that sort of retail food and beverage sales at hotels. The ownership howled — and sued — claiming the legislation was clearly intended to target their facility.

The hotel changed course, opting to create a 16-seat restaurant on the hotel’s ground floor, since restaurants are a permitted accessory use at hotels and resorts. But Planning Board members balked at that proposal too, voicing fears that the restaurant would become the fulcrum of a nightlife scene. The Town Board again threw a legislative wrench in the works with new legislation dictating that if an accessory restaurant were to be approved at a resort, the property would have to be able to accommodate a boost in the number of parking spaces.

But that legislation gave the Planning Board the right to waive the parking requirement if it saw the circumstances as warranting and — after a fair amount of debate, nonetheless — board members seemed resolved that such a waiver was warranted for the new proposal.

Bistrian noted that despite the property having only a small parking area on its property and several spots along South Eton Street that are partially or entirely in the town’s road right-of-way, the hotel has never had parking issues. More than half the hotel guests, she said, arrive to the hotel by taxi from the Montauk train and Jitney stops.

“We’ve never had a parking problem, we’ve never had a noise violation,” Bistrian said. “This is a bare minimum to meet the owners’ business needs. It’s a conforming use in a resort zoning district and it meets all the requirements.”

Board members debated whether approving the kitchen and waiving the parking requirements would set a legal precedent that other hotels could use to demand to be allowed to open restaurants. Board chairman Samuel Kramer, an attorney, said he thinks the provision that the kitchen is only for room service and catering special events and that there would be no food service to the public would set only that precedent.

“The only precedent this creates is if a motel wants to have a kitchen that they are going to use for room service,” Kramer said. “It’s not going to change anything.”