Well, it looks like it is going to be hard to replace Unk’s on the Bay restaurant. Blame the bridge.
, a restaurant in the Mago Point building that was Unk’s on the Bay, has gone out of business less than a year after it opened. The restaurant was moderately high-end, and was ran by husband-and-wife Vasili and Lisa Therecka.
The owner of the building at 361 Rope Ferry Road, Ali Arshard of Stamford, has put the property up for sale. Town records show that Ashard bought the property from Unks on the Bay Corporation in November of 2006 for $680,000, and now has an outstanding sewer lien on the property of $1,027 from March.
Lisa’s Landing made everything from steaks to seafood, and was run by Lisa Therecka, a real estate agent, and her husband Vasili Therecka, a chef, both from Brooklyn, Connecticut. Vasili Therecka had previously ran Portabella’s restaurant in Manchester for nine months and owned Brooklyn Pizza for seven years, which he sold in 2006.
Lisa Therecka did not return a Tuesday lunchtime voicemail by Patch. However, according to Planning Director Tom Wagner, perhaps it was a decision in the 1990s that doomed the restaurant, and perhaps Mago Point.
The Bridge
Originally, the bridge from Waterford to Niantic ran right through Mago Point (which is why Lisa’s Landing has a Rope Ferry Road address, despite no longer being connected to Rope Ferry Road). That bridge brought thousands of cars through Mago Point every day, which made it a good spot for restaurants and shops, Wagner said.
However the bridge was in bad shape, and in the 1990s was replaced with the current bridge, one that rides over Mago Point. That brought all the traffic with it, leaving the once busy spot now mostly traffic (and consumer) free, Wagner said.
The result is a spot that many motorists never go through, and is really just a draw for boaters who dock there, he said. All the businesses in that area will likely only survive if they are water-related, and the spot can likely only handle a few restaurants, Wagner said.
It could make sense to run a water taxi from Niantic to Mago Point to increase traffic, although it remains unlikely it would ever become a real downtown, he said. Instead Waterford, which has no real downtown area, would probably have a better chance of creating a downtown somewhere on Route 1, Wagner said.
