Restaurants will be given access to outdoor mall
Visitors to the Promenade will soon be dining center court.
To help showcase restaurants throughout the downtown area, a new staging area will be set up on the Third Street Promenade’s center court so chefs can cook up their specialties.
The plan will give downtown restaurants access to the busy shopping corridor. Some city officials believe too many restaurants have been pushed off the Promenade because of high rents, forcing them to move where rents are lower.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity for restaurants to showcase their foods right in the heart of the Promenade,” said Kathleen Rawson, executive director of the Bayside District Corporation, which unanimously approved the idea last week.
Rawson hopes to have center court dinning in place by this summer, but she said there are still many bureaucratic steps to be taken and health department permits granted before it becomes a reality.
The center court will be roped off from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and could be split into two sections, depending on demand.
Demand from restaurants also would determine how long each restaurant is allowed to occupy the space, but Rawson believes restaurants would change about every week.
“It’s really government at its best,” Rawson said. “There would be more exposure of restaurants without interruption to people who use the area.”
“It’s really government at its best. There would be more exposure of restaurants without interruption to people who use the area.” — – KATHLEEN RAWSON Bayside District Corporation executive director
But Mayor Mike Feinstein believes one group could be greatly affected — a small cadre of young people who gather daily in the center court to play hacky sack and hang out.
Many business owners have said they find the group irritating and they briefly discussed the prospect of banning all ball play on the Promenade in an effort to get rid of them.
“It’s some peoples’ response to the congregation and concentration of activities in the center court,” Feinstein said. “It’s a synergistic approach, a conjoining of the restaurant and center court issues.”
Rawson said the primary goal of creating center court dinning is to give restaurants more exposure, but eliminating an area where kids congregate also was a factor in the decision.
“It certainly has been discussed as a benefit to break up some of the center court activity with a non-legislative approach, which this is,” she said.
Many downtown restaurants have expressed interest in the idea, Rawson said. Some of them are restaurants that operate booths at the Wednesday Farmer’s Market. However, the market doesn’t allow food to be prepared and it doesn’t have a sitting area.
430,“I think for restaurants like ours it would be a good idea, especially if there is a way to then drive traffic to the restaurants themselves,” said Carollynn Bartosh, a manager of Border Grill. “It sounds like a great way to boost sales at an off-site place, but we want people to come to the main restaurant, too.”
Bartosh said center court dinning may be a good way for restaurants to rebound from the drop-off in sales stemming from massive downtown road construction during the past year.
“We could always use more businesses, and the road construction has made a negative impact on people wanting to come to Santa Monica,” she said. “We hope the mayor will join forces with us in encouraging people to come here and stay here.”
Outdoor dining may help maintain the character of the Promenade as a place for shopping, dinning and entertainment, supporters say. City officials think there is a need to maintain an appropriate balance of all three characteristics as a priority of the newly created “Promenade Uses Taskforce,” which will have its first meeting May 22.
498,“Independent of other center court issues, to have the live process of food preparation and eating on the street is something that many famous cities have around the world,” Feinstein said. “It can be seen as a real positive for the vitality of the street and the sensuality of the street to the extent that one likes the food being created.”
He warned that creating a satellite outdoor dinning area for restaurants off the Promenade will not solve what some believe is an imbalance on the retail-dominated outdoor mall.
“This is not a complete solution because we are displacing upon the public structure the responsibility for part of the failure of the market to provide a balanced and local commercial mix (of retail and restaurants) along with rents that are affordable,” he said.
“It’s good as far as it goes but by itself it really can’t and shouldn’t be the only answer,” Feinstein said.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 2, 2002. Read the original PDF.