King's Hawaiian pulls out of plans for NE Cobb restaurant

King's Hawaiian rezoning request approved

Not long after Cobb commissioners approved a site plan change last month to allow for a King’s Hawaiian restaurant in Northeast Cobb, the California-based company decided it would not go ahead with those plans.

Jason Linscott, a principal at Stein Investment Group, which owns the property at Gordy Parkway and Shallowford Road where the eatery was proposed, said King’s Hawaiian made the decision a week after the zoning hearing.

He said the reason was that the conditions included in the approval “weren’t going to make it work.”

In particular, Linscott cited a required 40-foot buffer between the back of the property and the adjacent Harrison Park tennis courts.

Stein had applied to reduce that buffer to just four feet for parking and drivethru access. But Commissioner JoAnn Birrell referred to a 1980s stipulation when the land was previously rezoned about a 40-foot buffer, saying reducing it “would set a precedent. It was put in place for a reason.”

During the hearing, Garvis Sams, Stein’s attorney, said not being able to reduce the buffer would cause “a considerable re-engineering” of the restaurant.

Linscott said that after the vote Stein “tried really hard” to keep King’s Hawaiian on board, but to no avail.

“It’s a little deflating,” Linscott told East Cobb News, saying he’s not sure what kind of development his company can get approved for that land.

East Cobb News has contacted King’s Hawaiian seeking more information.

It’s uncommon, but not unprecedented, for zoning applicants to pull out of projects after they’re approved. In another Northeast Cobb case in 2021, Pulte Homes withdrew from developing a 92-home subdivision on 50 acres on Ebenezer Road near Blackewell Road.

Linscott said there were other conditions that were approved at the request of the Gordy Architectural Control Committee and the East Cobb Civic Association that also were “not going to work” for King’s Hawaiian.

There also was some opposition from nearby residents about traffic issues, similar to those that prompted commissioners to reject plans for a Lidl grocery store at that intersection.

King's Hawaiian pulls out of NE Cobb plans — *The land proposed for the King’s Hawaiian restaurant (with the gold star) sits at a busy intersection near Lassiter High School.*

Birrell suggested in her motion to approve that Stein purchase adjacent county-owned land to address the buffer issues, but Linscott said that involved a complicated process involving title searches and other factors that also proved to be difficult to pull off.

“We tried to find other ways to do it,” Linscott said, but ultimately, King’s Hawaiian “felt they had given a lot of things” to open the company’s first restaurant outside of its southern California base.

“They said they didn’t feel like they were welcome,” he said.

King’s Hawaiian first filed for a site plan amendment in mid-2022, but didn’t get a hearing before commissioners in March.

The 1.14 acres on which the restaurant was to have gone is shaped like a wedge, next to the self-storage facility that Stein built after getting rezoning in 2021 to convert the former GTC Cobb Park 12 movie theater.

“We’re basically starting over,” Linscott said, saying “it’s not feasible to do a restaurant without getting into that buffer.”

Linscott said “we’ll do something there. I hate that it couldn’t have been something like this.”