New Restaurant Slated for Old Mudd's Site

The site of a falling-apart building that once housed Mudd's Restaurant got a new lease on life.

The City Council this week OK'd a lease-to-own development agreement with an Oakland restaurateur who plans to tear down the vacant building at 10 Boardwalk Place and replace it with an upscale Southern-style eatery.

Michael LeBlanc, , will name the San Ramon eatery Heritage (pronounced with a long "a").

As part of the deal, San Ramon's Redevelopment Agency will spend $480,000 to ready the site for the restaurant, including repaving the parking lot and entryway. The city and LeBlanc will go 50-50 on the $40,000 cost of preparing blueprints.

LeBlanc's 20-year contract gives him the option to buy in three years.

The agency said it wouldn't be cost-effective to renovate the existing building, which lies on the same two-plus-acres as the city-owned Crow Canyon Gardens in west San Ramon.

The city bought the property for a little more than $2 million after Mudd's went out of business in summer 2008.

LeBlanc's proposal to raze and rebuild the place has come with a murmur of controversy.

The original plan, as spelled out in city staff reports, was to turn the derelict building into a nature center, to complement the adjacent gardens. Early estimates say the cost to refurbish the place would come to $215,000.

San Ramon resident Joe Queirolo confronted city officials a couple of years ago about why a later estimate cited the cost of bring the building up to code at around $800,000 – a figure the city deemed "prohibitively expensive."

"Mayors of big cities are suggesting that redevelopment money has been crucial in creating jobs," he wrote in a recent e-mail to San Ramon Patch. "I wonder how many jobs were created ... by buying that building?"

The answer is none so far – but that appears bound to change in a matter of months.

LeBlanc plans to serve European, Caribbean and African dishes at Heritage as soon as autumn this year. The timing depends on the pace of construction.

In addition to the restaurant – which will get built in a Southern Colonial style – LeBlanc envisions including in the future 7,000-square-foot structure a banquet hall, a small country store and a meeting room.

For more details about the plan, click on the document attached to this article. For more on LeBlanc, read his bio here.