The 125-room Courtyard by Marriott in Danbury looks like it”™s losing customer parking spaces to two new restaurants built on either side of the hotel”™s parking lot in front of the building.
But looks can be deceiving.
“We didn”™t lose any parking spaces,” said Lisa Ferony, general manager of the five-year-old hotel. “We have a lot of parking in our back,” including a new back entrance opened in late August to give guests easier access, she said. “We knocked down a wall and put a new staircase in,” she said.
For the few years that the front parking lot was empty of the restaurant buildings, “a lot of our guest would park in the unoccupied lot.” But the owners of the land and buildings ”“ Buffalo Lodging Associates of Buffalo, N.Y., and its parent, Benderson Development of University Park, Fla. ”“ decided to build the Marriott without a full-service restaurant. “We only serve breakfast,” Ferony said, because the developers planned on building two other restaurants on the property on the city”™s east side.
The first restaurant is a Houlihan”™s, operated by Northeast Casual Food L.L.C. of Katonah, N.Y., in nearby Westchester County. The company is currently building another Houlihan”™s this one in Stamford at 5 Broad St., scheduled to open in November. The restaurant is a casual-dining chain that competes with the Appleby”™s and Chili”™s market, but with a more eclectic menu, said Dean Marino, director of operations at Northeast Casual Food.
The second restaurant in a separate building on the other side of the parking lot is a Sierra Grille, “which has a better product than Taco Bell,” Marino said. The 204-seat Houlihan”™s opened in early July and is about 5,800 square feet, smaller than the national average of 6,500 square feet because of site restrictions, he said.
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