Liquor license ruling raises questions about General Assembly’s role in special exemptions

The restaurant’s liquor license is endangered after a Rhode Island Supreme Court ruling last month that may have implications beyond Potsidis’ Waterman Street restaurant.

Starting around the first week of September, Potsidis confirmed he plans to start serving brunch and shift the current menu to accommodate the possibility of an indefinite dry spell.

“We’re going to keep a lot of the Greek flavors,” Potsidis said. “We’re going to add Palestinian resilience and soulfulness to it.”

The state Supreme Court on July 29 struck down a state law which cleared the way for the city to issue Estiatorio Fili’s liquor license. The law was passed by both chambers of the General Assembly in 2023 without controversy, and it allowed the Providence Board of Licenses to exempt Estiatorio Fili from a state law which restricts licenses under objections from a majority of neighboring property owners.

Rep. Edith Ajello, the Providence Democrat who sponsored the 2023 House bill for Estiatorio Fili’s exemption, said in a recent email: “We pass bills like this quite regularly to allow cities and towns to allow alcohol service within a certain [number] of feet of a school.”

The General Assembly often carves out exemptions for businesses in cities and towns — exemptions which, in the case of Potsidis’ restaurant, the Supreme Court found to conflict with the Home Rule Amendment of the Rhode Island Constitution.

“Attorneys in both chambers are reviewing the implications of the court’s decision in this matter and its potential impact going forward,” House and Senate spokespersons Larry Berman and Greg Pare said in a recent email.

“There are many other establishments which may be affected by this decision,” Ajello said, noting she had not read the entire decision.

Objections from neighborhood

The saga of potentially statewide ramifications began in 2022, when Estiatorio Fili applied for a Class BV liquor license through the Providence Board of Licenses. The real estate company Myles Standish Associates, which owns some properties within 200 feet of the restaurant, objected. This objection, known as a remonstrance, was permitted under the same section of state law that restricts liquor licenses from being issued too close to schools or churches. So, with the majority of the surrounding properties’ owners objecting, the Providence board could not issue Estiatorio Fili’s license.

That’s when Potsidis sought lawmakers’ help. Ajello and Sen. Sam Zurier, both Providence Democrats, submitted legislation in their respective chambers in 2023 to help Estiatorio Fili get its liquor license. The House Committee on Municipal Government and Housing was charged with vetting Ajello’s bill. When she came to testify in February 2023, she brought a map for each committee member to review.

Ajello verbally toured Wayland with her colleagues, pointing out one alcohol-serving restaurant after another, and all near Estiatorio Fili’s proposed location. She identified a nearby school as one of the obstacles to Estiatorio Fili’s request for a license, a request which to her seemed not “at all out of order given the number of such establishments already there.”

“We would not be, by passing this legislation, we would not be saying, ‘OK, open the restaurant,’” Ajello told the committee. “We would be allowing the city to consider it.”

The routineness of these exemptions was not lost on Rep. Brian Newberry, a North Smithfield Republican, who commented on Ajello’s bill as the 51st liquor license exemption encountered by the legislature in his tally.

“I’ve never seen an exemption get denied,” Newberry said then of the “archaic” underlying statute. “Seriously, this is silly at this point. We should obviously grant this.”

Rep. Matthew Dawson, an East Providence Democrat, who counted 61 times that exceptions have been made, agreed.

Dawson also asked Ajello if the nearby school had actually objected. She replied that, in her understanding, the school “has a rental agreement with the owner of real estate that is also home to many, many of the establishments that I just described to you.”

“So, if I understand your answer, it’s the person that owns the building might be objecting — rather than the actual school — who is already basically right above a bar, and they were objecting to another bar getting moved a few 100 yards down the street,” Dawson recapped.

“That’s a pretty good summary,” Ajello said.

This was not an exemption because of proximity to a school or church, Jeffrey Padwa, an attorney for Potsidis, explicitly told lawmakers. Estiatorio Fili was seeking “a legislative exemption from the legal remonstrance,” he said.

The General Assembly granted that exemption, singling out “225 Waterman Street, Plat 14, Lot 508” as the legislation’s target.

Providence’s licensing board was then able to grant the liquor license, to which Myles Standish objected. The real estate company then continued its challenge through the state Department of Business Regulation and ultimately Superior Court, which sided with Potsidis.

More than three years later, Justice Melissa Long wrote in the Supreme Court’s opinion that lawmakers had “plucked a specific address” from Providence’s tax assessor’s map.

This was problematic, in the Supreme Court’s view, because the legislature did not comply with either of the two options for legislating the “property, affairs and government” of municipalities, as provided by the state constitution’s Home Rule Amendment.

“The home rule amendment to the state constitution codified the principle that the powers of the General Assembly, however great, are not unlimited,” Long wrote.

How home rule works

Per the Home Rule Amendment, the General Assembly can enact laws that apply to all cities and towns, or it can ask voters to approve legislation that would impact a particular municipality with a home rule charter. The law did neither, in the court’s view.

“Even accepting the fact that the General Assembly possesses plenary authority to enact licensing laws that apply statewide, we are not persuaded that [Fili’s exemption] is a licensing statute subject to that plenary authority,” Long wrote.

The justices then argued that the act’s permissive nature — as Ajello had underlined in the bill’s 2023 hearing — was “at most, a procedural statute that lifts one potential barrier to the ability of Estiatorio to obtain a BV liquor license, but does not actually award the BV liquor license.”

In other words: the General Assembly did not use its broad, statewide powers over licensing when it passed the Fili exemption.

For Andrew Teitz, an attorney for Myles Standish, the ruling means lawmakers may need to rethink how they go about writing certain laws for specific municipalities.

“There are other things where they’ve done these special bills over the years that I think they will have to give a second thought to now,” Teitz said in a phone interview.

Teitz gave the example of local zoning boards. State law once provided for two alternate zoning board members. Some municipalities asked for the ability to appoint more alternates — an exemption which lawmakers granted over the years for towns and cities which asked, like Barrington did in 2020.

Then, in 2024, the General Assembly decided to change the enabling law statewide, and now every Rhode Island municipality can appoint between two and four alternates to its zoning board. Before lawmakers changed the enabling law statewide, Teitz said, they had preferred the narrower approach. He noted he had worked on drafting such legislation in both municipality-specific and statewide versions, with lawmakers expressing concerns that statewide laws may “get everybody’s attention” and it can be easier to legislate for specific towns.

Now, after Estiatorio Fili, Teitz argued that “when someone comes in and asks for something special for one city or town,” lawmakers should ask, “Do you want it badly enough to put it on a referendum for your voters, or is this something…we should change it for everybody?”

So many exemptions

There are also questions about the other 74 exemptions lawmakers have written for the same liquor statute.

Teitz drew a distinction between Estiatorio Fili and other exemptions because the liquor statute really contains three separate restrictions: proximity to schools, proximity to churches and remonstrances from neighboring property owners. In his research at least, Teitz said there have not been other exemptions which sought to defeat a remonstrance and that earlier exemptions overwhelmingly involved schools or churches.

Teitz was uncertain how the court’s decision might affect existing special acts for exemptions, which could face their own challenges — although the time to challenge many of these earlier exemptions may have already passed.

Potsidis’ attorney Padwa thinks the ruling has more outsized consequences.

“Our exemption happened to be number sixty-three, and it was the one challenged,” Padwa told Rhode Island Current in an email. “But there is nothing constitutionally unique about exemption 63 compared with any of the other 74 exemptions.”

In Padwa’s interpretation, the relevant issue is not what kind of restriction — school, church, or remonstrance — lawmakers exempted a property from. It’s instead whether lawmakers enacted legislation affecting a particular municipality’s licensing authority without local voter approval or a statewide law.

“The decision reaches beyond a single restaurant or a single license,” Padwa said. “Licenses issued under those 75 exemptions are now under a constitutional cloud….No one benefits from putting restaurants and other establishments in legal limbo — or out of business — overnight. Municipalities need a workable path to preserve existing licenses while the General Assembly addresses the statutory problem.”

A bar and a restaurant

Potsidis said he was “surprised and disappointed” by the ruling but respects the judicial process. He said he’s “leaving it up to my attorneys to see what options we have.” He declined to say how much he has spent on the yearslong licensing dispute, or what it has cost his restaurant.

“But right now, we’re mainly focused on making sure we’re getting fair treatment,” Potsidis said.

Potsidis said he didn’t expect his restaurant’s neighborhood dispute would have constitutional import. For him, the saga has been bitter and personal.

“When we first applied … one of the majority owners [of Myles Standish Associates] went around and approached neighbors, telling them that there’s going to be a Greek bar opening up, and we’re going to be open late, and we’ll have drunk people … urinating on their lawns,” Potsidis claimed. He said the use of “Greek” in this context was “a little troubling.”

Teitz said via email that “there were many people in the neighborhood who had experience with Mr. Potsidis and obviously I cannot speak for all of them.”

But none of his clients, to his knowledge, ever used “Greek” derogatorily. Potsidis had used the term plentifully himself “in his application materials and verbally in testimony,” Teitz noted.

“I do not understand how he could find it ‘troubling,’” Teitz said.

Teitz did not dispute that his clients called Estiatorio Fili a bar, and he wrote that Estiatorio Fili “is unable by law (building code) to have a grill/cooktop that requires a ventilation fan.” He said the restaurant’s floor plans showed only a few tables and stood by his previously reported comment that Fili is “a bar masquerading as a restaurant.”

In sworn testimony before the Department of Business Regulation in 2024, Potsidis said the restaurant had a 45-seat capacity. A 2025 Rhode Island Monthly review on the restaurant noted that the bar “takes up a third” of the establishment.

The neighbors’ objections, Teitz said, were rooted in concerns about nighttime noise and disturbances on a block that’s outside the busy center of Wayland Square proper.

“These streets that radiate out from the square, and this part of Waterman Street, were really all residential offices,” Teitz said on the phone. “There were no restaurants. There were no stores. It was a different character. There weren’t businesses that were open at night to disturb people who were trying to, you know, get their sleep and whatnot.”

Providence mayoral spokesperson Carl Austin Miller Grondin told Rhode Island Current Friday that Estiatorio Fili’s license remains valid for now, pending a Superior Court order to effectuate the Supreme Court’s decision. Grondin could not provide a timeline for the order’s arrival, nor what the Board of Licenses will do afterward.

“We’ve had a challenge right from the beginning,” Potsidis said. “I’m used to it. We’ll go right along, and we’ll do what we can. I’m very excited with the new menu.”

The menu largely derives from his mother’s recipes, Potsidis said. The restaurant is also named after his late mother, Emorfily, who was born in Greece in 1930 and lived through the Nazi occupation of Greece before migrating to Boston. She died in 2021.

Potsidis, who studied engineering and owns a real estate brokerage in the city called Geo Properties, called his restaurant a “passion project.” He owns, lives in and developed the residential building containing Estiatorio Fili, according to his testimony during the Department of Business Regulation proceedings in 2024. He tore down the unused two-story office building that once sat there and built four stories in its place, with the ground-floor retail space vacant until he decided to open the restaurant in 2024.

“We’re open only three nights a week, so, you know, it was more for fun and sharing my culture,” he said.

Potsidis placed his setbacks within his wider family history, and noted his grandparents were refugees from the Armenian genocide.

“My life pretty much has been a challenge,” Potsidis said.

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