Start the Presses: Eatery rising from the paperwork

The vacant shell of a failed Conroy’s Flowers sits — as it has for years — at the corner of Buena Vista Street and Burbank Boulevard.

Plans to turn the site into a 24-hour Taco Bell in 2011 were scrapped after intense opposition from neighbors, incensed at the prospect of rowdy teenagers and drunken millennials getting their gordita on at 3 a.m.

But hope for the highly visible corner surged in 2013 when a new owner put forth plans for a bakery/café — to be called “California Eatery” — along with a two-story office building and a one-story medical office building on the plot.

The Burbank Planning Commission approved the concept in January 2014. Owner Bryan Sim said at the time he planned to open the breakfast, lunch and dinner joint in May of that year. This time, the neighbors applauded, saying the project and potential patrons fit the area in a manner that seekers of down-market Mexican food never would.

It’s now more than a year-and-a-half later. The plot remains shuttered. The iron gates that block the Conroy’s entry are corroded with rust; weeds peek through the asphalt behind the cyclone-fence-enclosed parking lot.

According to tax and property records, the lot sold in June 2013 for about $2.5 million, which is a huge chunk of change to sit collecting dust. That doesn’t even include the $28,000 or so a year Sim has to pay in property taxes on a piece of land that’s not being used. So what gives?

I stopped by the Sim-owned Doughn*t Hut on Magnolia Boulevard — “all that’s missing is ‘u’“ — in an attempt to run down the mystery, but found nothing but the famed maple-bacon bars. I also called an eatery he owns in El Segundo, and dropped an email I found on some Planning Commission forms. Goose eggs.

My luck turned when I called John Cambianica, the architect who has been shepherding the project from the beginning. Reached at his Arcadia office, Cambianica acknowledged the process had taken far longer than expected, something he said could be at least partly blamed on myriad new local and state regulations and requirements.

At the end of the conversation, he promised to reach out to his client on my behalf, and — huzzah! — I got to speak to Sim himself on Friday morning. Despite the long and expensive delays, Sim remained cheerful and optimistic, noting that things are, at long last, moving forward.

The longtime Burbank resident said he had received bids from two general contractors, was waiting on a third, and expected to make a decision later this month. All the city requirements and issues have been resolved, he said, and construction could start as early as September.

The statement that he could open by May 2014, Sim acknowledges, “was really wishful thinking.”

Wiser about the vagaries of city permitting and construction work, Sim said he believes the complex will open between 10 to 12 months after work starts, a time frame that would end up being late summer or fall 2016.

Despite the optimism, Sim said it’s been difficult for him to have to tell the neighbors that supported from the beginning that one more problem, one more requirement or one more needed permit had delayed work.

It seems he need not worry. Robert Phipps, one of those neighbors that spoke in support of Sim in January 2014 said simply he’s excited that things are finally moving forward.

“The wait will make it sweeter when it’s here,” he said in an email.

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DAN EVANS is the editor. He can be reached at (818) 637-3234 or dan.evans@latimes.com.