A Dedham catering facility has been providing meals to roughly 400 migrants living in a next-door hotel for a week, but the company won’t be allowed to expand services to a hotel in Norwood it sought.

The Dedham Zoning Board of Appeals on Wednesday shot down a request from Giri Dedham, a subsidiary of Giri Hotel Management, for a special permit that would have expanded services to include other hotels providing emergency shelter for migrants.

More than a handful of residents and some ZBA members expressed confusion around what exactly was being proposed. Initially, an overarching thought was the applicant had wanted to turn a shuttered restaurant into a catering facility to serve migrants at a neighboring hotel.

But representatives from Giri Hotel Management and a town official confirmed to the ZBA that the company had already received the go-ahead to convert the former Victory Grille on Elm Street into a “kitchen-only” facility to serve a “little over” 400 migrants staying at the Fairfield Inn by Marriott Boston Dedham.

“The current operation to serve food to the long-term guests at the Inn would be an allowed use, and it continues to be an allowed use in conjunction with the uses of an inn,” Building Commissioner Kenneth Cimeno told the ZBA. “The purpose of the special permit would be for catering of off-premise meals to other locations.”

Giri Hotel Management, up until last Friday, had been using a kitchen in Quincy to serve its Dedham hotel and nine other area hotels housing migrants under the state’s emergency assistance shelter program since last August.

Company representatives told the ZBA the Quincy location continues to operate for the other hotels and using the kitchen at Victory Grille will provide “some relief.” The Quincy kitchen has been serving 3,000 meals a day to migrants, Kevin Corriveau said.

If the ZBA approved the special permit, Giri would have looked to use the Dedham kitchen to expand its catering service initially to the Holiday Inn Express in Norwood, where roughly 190 migrants are being housed, Corriveau said.

The company is continuing to serve the migrants at Fairfield Inn by Marriott Boston Dedham, one of two hotels in town being used to house homeless and newly arrived migrant families, the other being the Holiday Inn on Ariadne Road.

ZBA member Norman Vigil said he had a “hard time understanding” how the application met the “legal standards” for obtaining a special permit in town, adding residents expressed “legitimate concerns” around the proposal.

“You’re already feeding the people housed here in Dedham,” said Vigil, who is not a voting member for the board. “What it seems like to me is you’re just trying to get additional contracts and make more money off the money you put into the facility here in Dedham.”

The Victory Grill closed in February 2022, when the Norfolk County Sheriff’s Office seized the building. Giri Hotel Management is using just the kitchen side of the establishment, with the restaurant portion remaining vacant, said Justin Blais, the company’s corporate director of food and beverage.

Four staffers have been making and delivering the lunches and dinners to the Fairfield Inn, and Corriveau emphasized how revenue is not being generated back to Dedham, with it being a “state-funded program exempt from taxes.”

Giri Hotel Management has a contract with the state through the end of 2024.

“Every kitchen has a capacity limit,” Blais said when asked how large the Dedham operation could grow. “Realistically, we can’t say what that is yet – we just started and we are starting with people with lesser skills than what I might have at my restaurant.”

“But to think it’s going to grow into an enormous beast out of that one, no, not at all,” he added. “We’re not going to turn into a 24-hour facility.”