EAST BRUNSWICK, NJ — The lot at 651 Route 18 has been empty for years. The furniture store that stood there — Huffman Koos, and later Unclaimed Freight — was demolished after East Brunswick’s Planning Board approved a Lidl supermarket on the site in May 2022.
Four years on, nothing has been built.
In February, the Planning Board approved a revised plan for the same property, and the store East Brunswick is now going to get is considerably smaller than the one it signed off on the first time.
What changed
The 2022 approval was for a 31,042-square-foot grocery store with 155 parking spaces. The plan approved this year is for a 23,481-square-foot store with 109 spaces.
That is 7,561 square feet less — a 24 percent reduction. The new store is about three-quarters the size of the one originally approved, and there are 46 fewer parking spaces.
Alongside it, Lidl added something that was not in the 2022 plan: a 1,015-square-foot restaurant with a drive-through, on its own pad on the site. Even counting that addition, the total floor area is still about 6,500 square feet below what was approved four years ago.
The board approved the revised plan unanimously, 10 to 0, on Feb. 25, and formally adopted the written resolution documenting that approval on May 13.
Why the store shrank
This is not a company scaling back its plans for East Brunswick. It is a company changing its stores everywhere.
Asked at the hearing how the site compared with Lidl’s North Brunswick store, the applicant’s civil engineer, Alexander Lomei of Bohler Engineering, said the chain is “going through the process of bringing their buildings — they’re reducing the size of their buildings,” and that the older, larger design was “probably similar to the 30,000-square-foot building that was approved by this board a few years ago.”
Lidl’s attorney, Jennifer Mazawey, noted that the company’s Hazlet store runs about 34,000 square feet — “and that was what we were approved for here originally.”
Nobody knows what the drive-through will be
The 1,015-square-foot pad has no publicly identified tenant.
“We’re calling it a coffee shop,” Lomei told the board. “There’s still — they’re trying to sort out who the end tenant would be.” Elsewhere in the hearing, the applicant’s team said plainly that there was no tenant and no plan to sell the pad.
The restaurant should not be confused with the Raising Cane’s planned elsewhere on Route 18. Raising Cane’s was approved for the former Red Lobster property at 750 Route 18, a separate development from the Lidl site at 651 Route 18.
The Lidl property sits in the HC-2 highway commercial zone, which permits retail outright and conditionally permits restaurants with drive-throughs.
The township has been asking about the lot
The sharpest exchange of the night was not about square footage.
Joseph Criscuolo — East Brunswick’s business administrator, who also sits on the Planning Board — told Mazawey the site had become a problem. He described a letter about the fence being in disrepair, a tarp, unkempt landscaping, a pile of dirt and leftover asphalt, and said the township had raised it repeatedly.
“It’s not been once, it’s not been twice, it’s been many times since you’ve taken Huffman Koos down,” he said. “I was happy to see that building go, but we can’t have it become an eyesore.”
Then: “By this time, I really would have hoped that you’d have the store in operation.”
Criscuolo asked for direct contact and escalation numbers so the township would not have to chase a property manager, and said he would rather not issue a notice of violation and go to court. “Please just be a good neighbor and keep the site clean without us having to call you.”
Mazawey said she had passed earlier complaints on. “When it was brought to my attention, I did bring it to the folks at Lidl’s attention, and it was cleaned up fairly quickly at that point,” she said. “I recognize that may have been three or four contacts in.”
What the board granted
The revised plan needed five variances, most of them carried over from 2022. Lot coverage was approved at 80.4 percent where the ordinance permits 75 — though that is an improvement on the 84.9 percent allowed in 2022. Parking was approved at 109 spaces where 126 are required. The board also granted variances on the loading space dimensions, a side yard setback of 9.8 feet where 20 is required, and a parking and driveway setback of 2.5 feet from the side lot line, which is tighter than the 5 feet approved four years ago.
Still no date
No construction schedule or opening date was given at the hearing, and Lidl has not announced one. The board has not taken up the property since May.
For now, the approvals are in place, the plans are on file, and the lot is still empty.
