Sushi restaurant close to Regent’s Park gets go-ahead to serve booze – despite residents’ concerns over noise

A new sushi restaurant offering “fine casual dining” near Regent’s Park can serve alcohol with meals, a licensing committee has ruled.

The new eatery called 103 Parkway will serve up sushi, sashimi and tataki – meat or fish seared on the outside and raw inside.

The owners have already invested £200,000 into the shop and asked for an alcohol licence to serve drinks with meals to a maximum of 50 customers at a time.

Sushi chef consultant Tom Blackshaw, who owns a restaurant in Brixton, said food will be prepared in the downstairs kitchen and also in the bar area.

Some residents said they thought the kitchen shown on the plans was too small for a restaurant and were worried the venue would be a bar.

Blackshaw, who helped design it, said: “We are very used to working in small, tight locations.”

He said: “Japanese cuisine lends itself perfectly to this type of operation. We don’t need gas, we don’t need fryers, we don’t need extraction.”

The restaurant is in the Camden Town cumulative impact area, where the council has a policy of refusing new applications for drinks licences without good reason.

Eighteen residents wrote to the council to oppose the licence and raised concerns that drinkers could cause a disturbance in residential roads as they left or moved on elsewhere.

John Neve from the Albert Street North Residents Association explained: “We do suffer from noise and disturbance, particularly at weekends. The risk is that we think there would be numbers of people moving in what is largely a residential area.

“The whole balance of the area is at risk of changing in ways that would be hugely detrimental to those living in the area.”

An application by a different operator for an alcohol licence for a health cafe by day and winery in the evening was turned down in September “as the premises was alcohol-led”.

Camden’s licensing committee granted the alcohol licence until 11.30pm on Mondays to Thursdays, to midnight on Saturdays, and until 10.30pm on Sunday nights.

No off sales of alcohol are allowed.