APPLICATION FOR CORPORATE CHANGE TO LIQUOR LICENSE: SAZÓN (105 READE)
Sazón owner Genaro Morales needs to add his wife, Angela Terranova, as an owner on the liquor license. (They’re the two folks standing in the center of the above photo.) Neighbors, seeing this as an opportunity to vent, went through the usual list of reasons Sazón is annoying: The patrons congregate loudly outside, they get drunk and loud, they smoke, and they urinate. (One neighbor said that Gotham Bikes and Exceed Physical Culture had to install window boxes to stop Sazónites from sitting there.) Morales and his wife tried the old gambit of saying Ward III‘s patrons could be responsible, which is laughable to anyone who has ever walked down Reade, and also said there was nothing they could really do—that people have rights. Eventually the owners said they’d try harder to get their doormen to shoo people away, but I doubt anyone was really buying it. Vote: 8-0.

LIQUOR LICENSE TRANSFER: KAEDE JAPANESE CUISINE (90 CHAMBERS)
When I saw 90 Chambers on the CB1 agendas for September, I got confused and thought it was across the street, where Dojo Tribeca is (or is not?) going to be—even though I’ve reported umpteen times since that 90 Chambers is the old Jerry’s Café space. I couldn’t rally hear the applicants, other than that there would be no bar (besides a small sushi bar) and no happy hour. They didn’t submit a menu, and the room has 40 seats. Vote: 8-0.

LIQUOR LICENSE APPLICATION: TARA OF TRIBECA (20 WARREN)
“It’s going to be an upscale Irish pub with upscale food,” said Joe Crotty of Tara of Tribeca, coming to the former 20/20 space. (The menus are below.) It’ll have a 13-seat bar and 19 tables seating 76. He wanted to be able to stay open till 2 a.m. on weekdays and 3 a.m. on weekends “for police officers, firemen, and nurses heading home.” Despite having been a bar consultant for 23 years now, Crotty seemed genuinely surprised that CB1 wouldn’t dream of allowing such late hours on a side street—in fact, its default hours are midnight and 1 a.m., and you can come back after a period of good behavior to try again. (“I wouldn’t have signed the lease had I known about he restrictions.”) Crotty kept trying to bargain, possibly because committee members appeared to be asking rather than telling, and eventually the committee said he could come back after six months of being open. Vote: 8-0.

LIQUOR-LICENSE ALTERATION: HAUS (285 W. BROADWAY)
Haus owner Paul Horowitz was seeking to change the liquor license to allow weekend brunch (starting at noon) and 4 a.m. closing on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. (It already has 4 a.m. on Thursday through Sunday.) Haus has only been open three months, and Horowitz swore that it wasn’t functioning as a nightclub, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary; it has no cabaret license yet, but it’s applying for one. (“We don’t have a designated dance floor,” he said, showing a photo of the flat area in the middle of the space loaded with moveable furniture.) A public member of the committee who is an architect that is working with Haus said something on their behalf, and then that he was recusing himself—leading me to wonder whether one should recuse oneself from the discussion and not just the vote? Anyway, having just insisted on a six-month probation period to Tara of Tribeca, the committee felt it couldn’t really do something different for Haus, so it said OK to the brunch hours and that Haus could try for 4 a.m. when it was time to discuss the cabaret license application. No one appeared to be aware of the trend of getting shitfaced and dancing at brunch. Vote: 6-0, with two recusals.

SIDEWALK CAFÉ LICENSE RENEWAL: PEPOLINO (281 W. BROADWAY)
No changes. Vote: 8-0.

SIDEWALK CAFÉ LICENSE RENEWAL: AOA BAR & GRILL (35 SIXTH AVE.)
No changes. Vote: 8-0.

LIQUOR-LICENSE APPLICATION: GUNBAE (67 MURRAY)
As we already knew, Gunbae (in what was Lilly O’Briens) plans a Korean barbecue restaurant on the ground floor, with karaoke downstairs. The restaurant will seat 74; the seven karaoke rooms have a capacity of 70 people total, along with an eight-seat bar. The applicants—six principals total, three of whom are involved with of Bon Chon Chicken on John—were hoping for a closing hour of 3 a.m. seven nights a week, which wasn’t going to fly but it got debated anyway. Neighbors are concerned about noise, both outside and traveling from the seven karaoke rooms through the building and into adjacent ones, as happened with previous commercial tenants there, as well as through the air shaft in back. And the venting apparently only goes to the top of the five-story building, which causes trouble for the larger buildings nearby. (The barbecue will be done at each table, by the way.) A member of the committee who works with the applicants vouched for them—then said he’d recuse himself from the vote. (See my question in the Haus write-up, above.) Everyone was happy to hear that the storefront’s façade is being redone, but residents are worried that “Murray Street has become Bourbon Street” and “This kind of thing does not belong next to my house!” The community college across the street was mentioned, as was the church at 75 Murray (which chose to move in above a bar, but hey). And a lot of children live on the block, naturally. The folks from Gunbae said they were fine with closing at midnight and 1 a.m. (with a probation period), and they offered to have residents come by when it’s ready to make sure everything is OK. Much discussion later, it was revealed that Gunbae is hoping to open in March, which struck the committee as enough time to deal with some of the questions it has—such as why the cellar has only one means of egress and makes no ADA accommodations (i.e., a downstairs restroom), who will be advising the establishment on soundproofing, what the venting will be like, and so forth—and come back for another hearing. That also gives the committee time to go to a karaoke club; the members had no idea that private rooms are how it’s done these days. Heck, they could even just put Lost in Translation in the Netflix DVD queue….

PRESENTATION OF LANDSCAPE DESIGN FOR BOGARDUS PLAZA
Discussed here.