Shape of Water Restaurant Hits Parking Roadblock in Flagler County
Eight years and 21,000 hours went into Shape of Water, a themed French restaurant in Flagler County. Then the parking math didn't add up.
RUKAIYA KADIWAL 
On the evening of September 8, Brent Bruns stood before the Flagler County Planning and Development Board and tried to compress eight years of his life into a few minutes of testimony. He described the restaurant he has been building on a 0.58 acre lot on North Ocean Shore Boulevard not as a business plan but as a body of work: waterfalls, sculpted rocks, a lagoon crossed by bridges, a grotto carved by hand. "This is sweetheart dining," he told the board. "This is twos and fours, reservation only." It was the kind of sentence a man says when he has already pictured the room a thousand times: two chairs, four chairs, candlelight, a reservation book that never fills past capacity because capacity was never meant to be large.
The board listened for nearly two hours. Then it voted 5 to 0 to deny the special exception Bruns needed to legally operate as a Shape of Water Restaurant.
What Shape of Water Is Supposed to Be
The project, owned by Hammock Enterprises LLC, has been in development since at least 2024, when it was first reported as an intimate French dining concept built around handcrafted natural features: a lazy river, faux trees, elevated walkways, an outdoor gastropub. The plan calls for converting a home built in 1959 into a commercial kitchen while preserving a cottage that dates to 1940, folding new construction around structures that predate most of the surrounding development. Bruns has said French cuisine sits at the center of the menu, though the restaurant has never opened and no dining service has taken place.
He told the board he has put roughly 21,000 hours of his own labor into the property. That figure is worth sitting with. Spread across eight years, it works out to something close to a full time job, performed alongside whatever else fills a person's days, on a piece of land that, as of this month, still cannot legally serve a customer a plate of food.
A Permit That Expired Without Anyone Noticing
The legal tangle behind Friday's vote is almost as layered as the grotto itself. The property was granted a special exception for restaurant use back in 2018, but that approval was tied specifically to Hammock Enterprises LLC as the property owner. When the land was transferred to Bruns personally in 2019, the exception expired with the ownership change, a technicality that went unnoticed by county staff until they learned special events were being advertised on site. Bruns transferred the property back to Hammock Enterprises this past April, but by then the clock had already run out on the original approval. A new application was required from scratch.
That is the paperwork context for why a restaurant eight years in the making was, this month, still asking permission to exist.
Where the Argument Actually Lived: Parking
Nothing about the waterfalls or the grotto or the French menu occupied the board's attention Friday night. Parking did. County staff calculated that the site plan provides only 10 parking spaces, which under county rules caps the restaurant's usable seating at 350 square feet, enough, staff proposed, for three four top tables, five two top tables, and three bar stools. It is a small enough footprint that Bruns' own description of the concept, small reservation only seatings staged across three service periods a night, seems to have been shaped as much by the parking math as by any culinary philosophy.
Neighbors weren't convinced the math would hold in practice. One resident whose family owns adjoining property said she worried that once the ten spaces filled, customers would park along roads, grass, or sidewalks, and raised separate concerns about emergency access, lighting, and noise. A speaker from the group Scenic A1A PRIDE argued the site sits on a curve in a 50 mile per hour zone, calling it "a huge traffic safety problem," and questioned how delivery trucks would even reach the property. A resident living directly behind the restaurant said he had already heard amplified music from events on site and feared overflow parking would land in his neighborhood: "There's no parking there. So the overflow is coming over to us and we're dealing with it." Another speaker pushed back specifically on the reservation only premise, noting that turning away walk in customers is harder in practice than it sounds on paper, and raised the image of diners parking across A1A and crossing the busy road on foot.
Bruns disputed the idea that customers would spill into the neighborhood behind the property, saying there wasn't meaningful space there for cars to park in the first place. He also told the board that boats, a tent, and other items currently stored on the property would be cleared to make room for the parking area once it's built.
A Denial Without an Ending
The board's vote was unanimous, and it turned squarely on whether the site could realistically support the restaurant it was being asked to approve. But the denial came "without prejudice," county language for a door left open rather than closed. Bruns can return with a revised application addressing the parking concerns that sank this one, and nothing in Friday's vote prevents Shape of Water from eventually opening.
Immediately after denying the special exception, the board turned to a related variance request and approved, 5 to 0, setback relief for two existing structures on the property: the outdoor gastropub, built without a permit and requiring a 7 foot variance from the required 10 foot side setback, and the 1940s cottage, which needed a 22 foot variance from the standard 25 foot rear setback. Staff noted the cottage predates the county's land development code entirely, and that Bruns appeared to have acted in good faith on the gastropub structure, believing it could be placed in line with the existing cottage. Two other pieces of the original variance request, a 40 foot landscaping buffer and outdoor seating allowances, were dropped from consideration once the special exception failed, since they no longer applied to a restaurant that isn't yet approved to operate.
What the Fight Is Really About
Strip away the waterfalls and the grotto, and the Shape of Water Restaurant's stall is a familiar story in small coastal communities: a distinctive, labor intensive concept colliding with the physical limits of a small lot in a neighborhood not built to absorb restaurant traffic. Ten parking spaces is not a number Bruns can negotiate his way around with reservation systems and hospitality, it's a hard constraint written into county code, and the board's questions Friday suggest they weren't convinced that policy and good intentions could substitute for pavement. Bruns has said he eventually hopes to acquire additional property nearby for parking, which would be the more durable fix if it materializes.
For now, the cottage and the gastropub stay standing, protected by the setback approval. The kitchen inside the 1959 house, the bridges over the lagoon, the eight years of hand built detail, all of it remains exactly where Bruns left it, waiting on a second application and a parking plan the board can say yes to. Whether that plan arrives, and what it looks like, will decide whether Shape of Water becomes a restaurant or stays, indefinitely, a very elaborate piece of property.
Source: Palm Coast Observer, "Shape of Water restaurant proposal falls short over parking concerns," by Rich Carroll, September 10, 2026. Official county information: flaglercounty.gov. Related reading: how operational disruptions test resilience across the restaurant industry.
