El Cavair Capesino located at 39 W. Seventh St. is looking to set up a commercial kitchen within the home. This ran into some mixed and concerned sentiments at Dunkirk’s Planning Board last week.

“What they’re doing is taking a residential and turning it into a partial commercial,” board member Frank Torain pointed out.

“They do have a permit from the Health Department to do the mobile food truck, but as part of that they have to have a commissary area at their home, which they have a separate kitchen space that they had to designate for the food truck,” Chris Piede, chairman of the planning board said. “Building and zoning said that because it’s in one zone it does require site plan review by the Planning Board to have it officially move forward.”

Many at the meeting agreed it was a home occupation and weren’t quite sure what to do with this site plan. However, board member Ed Schober cited this as a zoning issue and was confused as to why it came to the Planning Board.

“The intent of the code is not to have commercial kitchen activities with food preparation and dumpsters in a R1 district,” Schober said. “I don’t know how this could be coming before us before it goes to zoning. Imagine the precedence we’d be setting if we start letting commercial kitchens in an R1 area. That’s why we have a business district. That’s why we have zoning.”

After some deliberation city attorney Richard Morrisroe advised the board to table the review, pending necessary conversations.

“My recommendation is for this board to table this, because the issue here is square peg, round hole, this isn’t a planning board issue, this is a business in a location, this is neighbors that have complaints that go beyond the business,” Morrisroe stated. “As city attorney I’m willing to sit down and mediate with the neighbors on the issues that came alight in letters and also sit down with them to give them some ideas on what they need to do. There’s a few different conversations that have to happen before we get to this conversation.”

The board agreed unanimously to table the review during the meeting.