Two new restaurants expect to open in the first six months of next year on the site of the now-closed Friendly's restaurant in the ShopRite/Kohl's shopping center on Route 70 in Marlton.
After being sued by owner Marlton UE LLC over its denial in March, the Evesham Zoning Board of Adjustment on Monday night unanimously approved a revised plan to demolish Friendly's and add a new 10,800-square-foot retail building that would house four tenants.
"They're motivated to get open in the first half of 2024," Colin Stirrat, vice president of development at Manhattan-based Urban Edge Properties, said of restaurant tenants CAVA and First Watch, both of which hold leases on the new building. They "still want to be here very much."
CAVA, which offers meals with Mediterranean roots, has seven locations in New Jersey, with the closest one on Nixon Drive in Moorestown.
First Watch, which focuses on breakfast and lunch, has restaurants in South Jersey on Haddonfield Road in Cherry Hill and in Sewell. The chain takes its name from the nautical "first watch" or first shift of the day, the time of breakfast, according to its website.
Marlton UE sued Evesham in state Superior Court in Burlington County on April 20 after the March 20 denial of its earlier proposal.
The zoning board had voted against, 4-3. Some members said they were concerned about traffic patterns in an already-congested parking lot.
Previous 70and73.com articles on this news
- Out of court: How ShopRite/Kohl's shopping center owner will try again with Evesham zoning board.
- Evesham zoning board denies latest plan to add stores to ShopRite plaza on Route 70.
- Plaza owner wants to tear down Friendly's in Marlton, build fast-food restaurants, stores.
Under the revised preliminary and final site plan, the owner will add a sidewalk along the full frontage of Route 70 and connect it to the front of ShopRite with a new sidewalk through the parking lot.
Marlton UE also said the amount of time to exit allowed by the traffic light also would be increased, under the owner's proposal to the New Jersey Department of Transportation.
The owner also wants to reduce some of the traffic entering from Route 70 by adding a third entrance, at the westernmost (the Wineworks end) of the shopping center. The driveway there now is a right-turn-only exit.
"There always has been a desire to make the access better," Marlton UE's lawyer, William F. Hyland Jr., of the Marlton firm of Hyland Levin Shapiro, told the board.Â
He said the center owner several times has sought an entrance from Route 73, but the state DOT won't even hear the proposal, Hyland said.
