Bowie Business Brouhaha

If you're active on Nextdoor.com, you may have followed the mostly online controversy surrounding Half Note Restaurant.

Half Note, a popular minority-owned restaurant and music venue, operated for years at Duval Village Shopping Center in Glenn Dale. The center was bought out by a church during the pandemic and most of the tenant businesses moved out.

After a two year hiatus, Half Note's owners began looking for a new home, including locations in Bowie. Last month, they entered negotiations to open at Marketplace Shopping Center in the space recently vacated by ASAP Cleaners.

The controversy began when an area resident got wind of Half Note's negotiations and began raising concerns in a series of Nextdoor posts that the business was a poor fit for the shopping center. What followed was a series of highly followed posts with commentary and debate for and against the restaurant.

The poster's concerns ranged from lack of parking, to worries about alcohol being served near the Bowie Community Center, and concerns about noise from live indoor music.

As a business, Half Note was a local favorite, operating as a restaurant and indoor music venue adjacent to a wealthy suburban neighborhood. It catered to a 40s – 50s upper-middle-class clientele with a model similar to that of existing Bowie restaurants Old Town Grille and Blue Sunday.

In addition to decrying the restaurant's tentative move, the resident posted a series of poll questions gauging resident opposition to the business. They also sought to make themselves a middle-man between the community and the shopping center owner. Most of comments on the posts have been supportive of the restaurant.

Ultimately, Half Note is an established business with a good reputation. Berman Enterprises, the owner of the Marketplace Shopping Center, took a lot of flack for their past proposal to build residential apartment units at the site of their redevelopment, but it's hard to argue they haven't been a good commercial landlord.

The shopping center is clean, has attractive store-fronts, is full of popular retail tenants, and has come a long way from the previously 90% vacant center that preceded it. It's hard to imagine how the restaurant would hurt the center or negatively impact the surrounding corridor given it operated until recently in the same type of shopping center without issue.

Given restaurants are allowed in commercial centers and existing businesses at Marketplace already serve food and alcohol, it's unclear what the concerned resident will accomplish from the online fracas. Provided all parties follow applicable laws, neither the city nor the county have a say in prospective business tenants negotiating with commercial landlords.

It's nonetheless become a more common idea in recent years that politicians should actively insert themselves in private commercial business decisions. I've written about this in past columns, and will have more to say on that in the future. In this particular case, Half Note is very much the kind of business area residents say they want more of: independent, mid-to-upper tier, with the bonus of being locally and minority owned.

Provided they successfully negotiate a lease with Berman Enterprises, navigate the notoriously byzantine county permitting process, and open their doors, Half Note will be subject to the same rules that apply to all area businesses. If they can maintain local customer support, they'll be profitable and succeed. If they upset their neighbors, make life difficult for their commercial landlord, or fail to attract local customers, they'll fail.

Personally, I'm rooting for their success and welcome them to the area. If the community wants more independent non-chain restaurants–as has been said more and more in recent years–we're at some point going to have to take yes for an answer.

Have thoughts on Half Note? Do you have concerns about business quality in the city? Write me your thoughts at mesteve@cityofbowie.org.