Kona Grill to bring patio dining to Pratt St. 

Posted: 7:42 pm Wed, January 27, 2010
By Robbie Whelan
Daily Record Business Writer

A glassed-in patio surrounded by neatly landscaped green space would welcome passers-by to the Kona Grill, a second restaurant to be added to the Verizon Building in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, according to details released Wednesday.

The “east meets west” fusion eatery, set to open in the spring, would be an early sign of progress in an ambitious city plan to remake Pratt Street as a walkable retail destination.

City officials Wednesday approved the lease of a 1,500-square-foot section of public-owned space in front of 1 E. Pratt St., which the building’s owner hopes to convert into a patio for street-side dining. The owner will pay $17,000 in annual rent on the city land, with that rate increasing to $32,000 by the end of the 10-year lease.

Renderings of the plan showed the addition, designed by Baltimore architects Brown Craig Turner, with an Eastern flair to its sloping, pagoda-like roof.

The Verizon Building location will be the 25th Kona Grill in the country. The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based chain serves Japanese-American fusion cuisine, specializing in fresh seafood and homemade sauces, with prices ranging from $4 happy hour sushi rolls to $30 steak filets. The restaurant will be 7,000 square feet in total.

The plan also calls for “several hundred thousand dollars” of landscaping work for the city-owned land surrounding the patio, according to J. Brad Griffith, founder and principal of Griffith Properties LLC, the building’s owner.

“Because it’s going to be a while before that Pratt Street plan is executed in its entirety, we wanted to put something there,” Griffith said. “This property is especially well located for restaurants, and of course in Baltimore it’s all about location. … It’s going to be lovely.”

Boston-based Griffith Properties bought the Verizon Building in 2006 for $20.6 million from Denver-based real estate private equity firm Amstar Group LLC. Verizon is the tenant for the majority of the building’s 320,000 square feet of office space.

Beginning in March 2007, the owner began a $12 million renovation of the property’s lobby, windows, roof and heating systems. The redesign was done by architects Ayers Saint Gross, and was meant to upgrade the building from its Class B designation (mainly because of its age — it was built in 1977) to the pricier Class A.

A year later, Sullivan’s Steakhouse, an upscale restaurant favored by the business lunch crowd, opened in the building’s ground floor with an entrance facing the Inner Harbor on Light Street.

Ayers Saint Gross is the same firm selected by the city in September 2008 to lead a $100 million redesign of Pratt Street, which runs along the city’s main tourist attraction, the Inner Harbor, geared at making it a more walkable “grand boulevard.” Last year the city began removing large, unsightly mounds of grass-covered earth on the street’s north side to make way for expanded retail development.

“This is the beginning of Pratt Street retail,” said M.J. “Jay” Brodie, president of the Baltimore Development Corp.

Kona Grill is slated to begin construction Monday and open to the public in April or May. Griffin said he was in “final negotiations” to bring two more eateries, a coffee shop that serves lunch and another sit-down restaurant, to the building.

Bryce Turner, president of Brown Craig Turner, said the sloping roof of the restaurant’s patio was meant to be “an uplifting, glassy, contemporary structure.”

“The idea was to create a structure that looks taller than it really is, and has good feng shui, perhaps,” he said, referring to an ancient Chinese system of building design and space arrangement.

“In general, I think retail on Pratt Street needs to be presented a lot better towards the street.”