Expansion plea from Bournemouth seafront restaurant boss
Urban Reef at Boscombe wants to serve food and drink on a decked area of the beach
A seafront restaurant in Bournemouth could go out of business unless councillors allow it to expand onto the beach, its managing director has warned.
Mark Cribb, who runs Urban Reef at Boscombe, urged BCP Council’s licensing sub-committee to approves its plans to expand its operation onto a decked area when it met on Wednesday.
He said the business was “on the brink of failure” and that it needed to be “given an opportunity to trade its way out of the mess”.
In March he applied to the council for a new, extended licence which would allow the restaurant to serve food and alcohol to its decked area on the beach.
But Dorset Police concerns about the addition of extra alcohol sales along the seafront prompted it to request a decision on the application be made by a licensing sub-committee.
“My concern is that without additional measures in place the extension of the existing provision will adversely impact the ability of Dorset Police and our partners to manage the demand from the volume of visitors to the Bournemouth beaches,” licensing sergeant Gareth Gosling said.
He requested a series of conditions be attached to the new licence. Most of these were agreed before the meeting but others had not, including a proposed ban on alcohol off-sales.
Despite this, Mark Cribb, the restaurant’s managing director, called on the sub-committee to approve the licence, saying it would help the business recover from the pandemic.
“This period has been really tough, operating with Covid restrictions, either being told to fully close and cease trading or to operate at less capacity,” he said. “We’ve lost 50 per cent of our revenue.
“This year we’ve already completely lost Easter, we’ve lost the first bank holiday due to heavy rain and even when we do reopen next week we have social distancing, the rule of six, no events or no parties.”
He said this had left the business with “significant backlogs” in rent owed to the council and VAT owed to HMRC.
He added: “We need to be given the opportunity to find a way to trade out of this mess, otherwise we make what was once a viable business a non-viable one and it will be forced to close.
“I’ve invested over a million pounds into this business in 11 years of my life and to see it on the brink of failure, through no fault of my own is heart breaking.”
He said £270,000 had been spent on the decked area to expand the capacity of the restaurant.
A decision on whether to grant the licence was made at Wednesday’s meeting but it has yet to be made public.