Capitol Shopping Center wants to add restaurant, Starbucks on Storrs Street

By LEAH WILLINGHAM

Monitor staff

Published: 02-20-2020 1:31 PM

The owner of the Capitol Shopping Center on Storrs Street in Concord wants to add an upscale casual dining restaurant and a Starbucks drive-thru in the parking lot where Market Basket, the New Hampshire Liquor Commission and several other major retailers currently lease.

Brixmor Capitol SC, LLC went before the Concord Zoning Board earlier this month to apply for variances for parking spaces and to have a drive-thru at 80 Storrs St., an area of the city where drive-thrus are not usually permitted.

In that meeting, company representatives presented a proposal for a 5,800-square-foot 110 Grill, a popular American restaurant with locations in Manchester, Nashua, Stratham, West Lebanon, Rochester, Massachusetts and New York. The Starbucks drive-thru would be approximately 3,000 square feet, with 6,000 square feet of extra building space that could be leased by another retailer. 

“This is really our first step to figure out how to revitalize the Center and better connect it to downtown,” Brixmor Re/Development Project Director Reuben Twersky said. 

Representatives said the new development would be at the bottom of Pleasant Street, near where the entrance to the shopping center is now. The buildings would be located right off the road on Storrs Street, instead of set back, like the other retailers in the center. 

Brixmor representatives said they think a restaurant like the 110 Grill would do well in Concord. Each of 110 Grill’s restaurants has a bar, a lounge, dining room and an outside patio with a fire pit with couches around it.

The average dinner bill is $25 per person. Some of the restaurant’s signature dishes include chimichurri steak, chicken caprese, cucumber avocado tuna and bourbon-marinated steak tips, according to 110 Grill’s website. All dishes are made from scratch and all of the menu is available gluten-free.

In a May 2019 interview with Forbes, owner Ryan Dion said he and his partner, real estate developer Rob Walker, look for locations that aren’t saturated with restaurants when they choose sites for their business. On the restaurant’s website, the company says a location will be opening in Portsmouth in summer 2020 and in North Conway in the fall. It says the Concord location is also coming fall 2020. 

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However, before that happens, a challenge that needs to be worked out with the city involves parking. Brixmor wrote in its application to the city that there are more than enough parking spaces available in the parking lot to accommodate a restaurant and Starbucks.  

An issue is that the lot is commonly used by people who are not customers of the plaza and want to access the free parking while shopping or working downtown. The proposal stated that Brixmor “is considering various methods to better control unauthorized parking.” It also stated that employee parking would be at the rear of its new building to free up other spaces. 

“In the 15 years that Brixmor has owned the property, their experience is that it is dramatically overparked,” Attorney John Arnold of Hinckley Allen Law Firm, who was at the zoning board meeting representing Brixmor, said. “There is a surplus of parking spaces that don’t get used. It’s a very big parking lot. During certain times of the day, certain pockets of it do fill up, particularly the area in front of Market Basket gets busy at times, the area in front of Marshalls gets busy at times. But the area where these buildings are proposed, which is kind of that front corner, generally doesn’t see a lot of use.” 

Brixmor was before the zoning board asking to be able to provide 754 parking spaces where 977 spaces are required by the city. There are 45 existing on-site parking spaces currently leased to an offsite business, bringing the number of on-site spaces up to 799.

Zoning board members said they would like to get input from the city planning department on whether the parking proposed would be sufficient before making a decision.  

Rueben said he, like many in Concord, see Storrs Street redevelopment as a focus of Concord’s revitalization. 

“We look at this site, similar to I think others in town, as an opportunity to redevelop. We are challenged though, because we have leases with national tenants, including Market Basket, Burlington and Marshalls, all the way out, actually until 2034, which makes it hard to really redevelop this whole center currently,” he said. “We look forward to talking with the city to explore opportunities of how to do that. Retail is an evolving industry, you never know what will happen. Tomorrow, Burlington could tell us they’re moving, and then there’s the opportunity.

“I’m happy to say that all three of those stores, on the national side, all do well, which is great for our center and the city of Concord. We want to do this as a first phase to revitalize the center and really connect it better to the downtown,” he said, of the proposed 110 Grill and Starbucks project. 

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