Westbury’s Board of Trustees ended another tense meeting without a final decision on whether to allow a local restaurant to offer live entertainment.
Cena 081, an Italian restaurant on Post Avenue, is applying for a renewal of its cabaret license. Residents living nearby, who are already concerned by the volume of the restaurant’s music and past events, are pushing the mayor to deny him one.
“When they play and then people start reacting and screaming above the music, there’s nobody there to control it,” said one of the about half dozen people who came to the meeting to speak against the permit for nearly an hour and a half. “The music gets louder. It’s blasting. It really sounds like a club.”
According to residents who live nearby, Cena 081 has been playing the music at disruptively loud volumes late at night, holding live singing events that create additional, excessive noise from the crowd and hosting club-type party events with DJs that prevent them from sleeping and relaxing.
Cena 081 has received multiple noise violations and other complaints over the years. Though the owners have not received a summons from the village, Westbury Mayor Peter I. Cavallaro said the village was working to enforce local code as diligently as possible and would continue to do so should Cena 081 be granted the permit.
The board held a public hearing last month on the same matter, which nearly ended in a fight between a resident and the restaurant’s representatives. Cavallaro said the board was working to find the best solution and hoped to reach one by their public work session on May 15 or next regular monthly meeting on June 5.
“You live in a location that’s adjacent to a business district. That doesn’t mean that you’re not entitled to a quiet enjoyment of your property, but there’s a different level of expectation when you live immediately adjacent to a business district than if you live in the middle of the park,” Cavallaro told the residents who came to the meeting.
“That’s just reality. He has rights as a property owner, just like you have rights as a property owner,” the mayor added. “It’s the village’s obligation to try to balance your rights and to come to a situation which is maybe not completely acceptable to either of you, but is substantially acceptable.”
Since that last meeting, the restaurant has presented modified plans to attempt to reduce its level of disruption to the public. The restaurant’s owner, Christopher Stasi, said it underwent an acoustics consulting report, removed speakers on the roof, will ensure the remaining speakers are played at a lower volume and turned away from nearby homes, substantially changed the interior layout, will have live music inside of a form of an enclosure with additional walls to block sound and will not make excessive noise past 10 p.m.
Despite that residents said they felt preventing the establishment from receiving this permit would reduce the disruption they have been experiencing. Multiple residents also aired other grievances about Cena 081 at the meeting, including what they perceived as the restaurant’s inadequate parking and inadvisable capacity increase, with boiling tensions frequently threatening to throw civility out the window.
When the mayor said the board visited the restaurant themselves to see how disruptive the sound was to nearby houses and did not hear excessively loud music, residents shook their heads and said the board’s visit wasn’t representative of what they experienced.
“If you have 100, 120 people, talking, screaming, whatever, as the night gets by, and then you put the radio up there, I’m going to hear it,” one resident said. “I don’t care where you guys were. I don’t care who came there. You came here for one day. I’m there everyday.”
Stasi told the residents he wanted to work with them to find an agreeable solution, even suggesting they come into the restaurant and mark an acceptable volume on his speaker, though some were unreceptive to the attempt at amnesty.
Cavallaro said a possible course of action may be to provide Ceno 081 with the permit with certain additional conditions on a probationary period of a few months, then hold another public hearing to assess whether the owners were operating within the allowable constraints and respecting the peace of the residents.
Some members of the public found this frustrating, with one saying he felt no matter what they said, the board would give the restaurant the permit. Another found the proposition relatively agreeable but added that she would be tracking, noting, and recording any time the restaurant played music too loudly.
As the clock crept past 9 p.m. and residents continued to repeat their complaints about the establishment, the mayor stepped in to close the meeting before tensions overheated, reiterating that the board was reserving a decision on the matter until later this month or early June.
