Fans of Amherst's former Tandoori Royal Indian Cuisine can soon take heart: you might not be able to dine on chicken curry there anymore, but you could live there instead.
The former owners of the restaurant – which filed for bankruptcy and then closed in February 2017 after a 25-year run – plan to demolish the vacant stone-facade building and replace it with a five-story apartment building.
Dubbed "The Junction" for its location at the intersection of Transit Road and Sheridan Drive, the building at 7740 Transit will contain 40 units, including 24 two-bedroom apartments, 10 one-bedroom apartments and six studio lofts.
It will also offer 5,000 square feet of amenity space on the second and fifth floors, and a 5,000-square-foot two-part rooftop deck.
The project will also include 72 parking spaces – both surface, as well as a parking garage under the elevated structure. .
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The developers – Ravi Sabharwal and Jayesh Patel – are seeking a rezoning of the 1.53-acre property from "general business" to "deep corridor" to allow the project. In their application to the Town of Amherst, they noted that "the proximity to amenities and the workplace made this site very attractive" for this type of project, which is aimed specifically at young professionals.
If approved, construction by Best Brothers Development would begin in spring 2022, with completion by spring 2023.
Sabharwal declined to comment.
The project comes five years after Ravi and Rita Sabharwal closed Tandoori and the adjacent Palm's Banquets. The couple had opened their restaurant on Delaware Avenue in 1991, but moved to Amherst in 1999, and then opened Palm's Banquets in 2001. But they fell under a cloud by 2013, when IRS agents raided both the restaurant and the couple's home as part of a criminal probe into undeclared income and employee wages.
Ravi Sabharwal pleaded guilty in federal court in 2014 to filing a false tax return and under-reporting his restaurant's profits to avoid tens of thousands of dollars in taxes. He was sentenced to time served and six months of home confinement in 2014, but the restaurant never fully recovered.
It filed for bankruptcy in March 2016, with hopes of reorganizing, but the couple chose to close instead.
The couple previously invested in other businesses, and had abruptly closed one of them, McKinley's Banquet and Conference Center in Blasdell, after running into financial problems in 2011.