Shiki: New Life Revival as Funeral Home

The shuttered Shiki restaurant is expected to be revived as a funeral home this fall.

Drive or walk up to the once-lively and and you can view the drastic changeover to a more sedate use now underway. New pieces of wood lay outside the nearly 35-year-old, one-of-a-kind building on Route 35 just south of Old Country Road.

Brown craft paper covering the lower half of the doors partially hides any work going on inside. The interior is devoid of the signature 1970s-style hibachi tables or any other signs of its past life as the area's premier Japanese restaurant — before the Japanese cuisine market was so saturated and in vogue.

The decorative breezeway with its twin concrete columns that served as Shiki's ornate entrance is looking more conservative with wood panels nailed to its front archways.

Middletown Township Construction Official Joe Kachinsky confirmed that partial building permits for the structure’s exterior have been issued and other permits for the interior are pending approval.

Kachinsky would not disclose the names of the applicant or recipient of those permits.

If construction continues on schedule, the new funeral home will welcome its first visitors in September or later this fall, Kachinsky said.

The Goldstein Group, a commercial real estate firm, handled the sale to "a family that owns and operates funeral homes in New Jersey," according to Chuck Lanyard, president of the firm.

The new owners, who closed on the sale about three to four weeks ago, have not yet "gone public" about purchasing the Shiki property Lanyard said, so names are not yet available nor is the selling price.

Even with a paved, albeit pot-holed, driveway connecting Route 35 with its sizeable parking lot, the Shiki property remained on the real estate market for more than three years before purchase.  No longer the novelty it was when it first opened in the late 1970s, the steakhouse shut its doors about 18 months ago. 

The new owner can change the aesthetics of the building's exterior or its outside premises without seeking site plan approval or variances said Township Planner Jason Greenspan.

"If they were to expand or alter the building or the parking lot, they would have to come before the planning board," Greenspan said. He indicated that he does not know who purchased the property.

The application in the building department only calls for a change in tenancy, not in the structure's use, he added. A funeral home is an approved use in the commercial zone where Shiki is located.

During its time on the market, one potential developer considered converting Shiki into a retail center with a farmer’s market. That developer ended up never pursuing his plan.

Years back, controversy arose when Wawa was eying the property for a convenience store, replete with gas pumps, a few years ago. At the time, Wawa had then hoped to construct two such complexes in the township — one at the Shiki site and the other on Route 36 in the Leonardo section, recalled Township Administrator Anthony Mercantante.

Residents living off Old Country Road, used to having the woods behind Shiki as a buffer, strongly objected to having a convenience store and gas station open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so close to their homes.

So, Wawa eventually abandoned its plan for the Shiki site for various reasons, said Mercantante, who was Middletown's planner at the time. The company has since constructed and opened its present-day complex in Leonardo, on Route 36, at what locals refer to as the former Firemen’s Field.

Once open, the new funeral home on the Shiki site will join three others operating in the township. Those businesses — John F. Pfleger Funeral Home on Tindall Road, Scott & Kedz Home for Funerals on Church Street in Belford, and John P. Condon Funeral Home on Route 36 in Leonardo — are all long-established fixtures in Middletown.