Live Music, Mexican Food Hub Juanita’s For Sale

Juanita’s Mexican Café & Bar is for sale, five years after it moved into its President Clinton Avenue location.

The venue only serves dinner and features live music on a regular basis. Its owners are moving on to concentrate on the live music business and are looking for “an experienced operator for the restaurant,” according to a news release from the Davidson Law Firm of Little Rock.

The news release said the “new restaurant management will allow the owners to focus on the live music concerts and other business interests.”

Landlord Dennis Long owns the building, located at 614 President Clinton Ave.; Juanita’s is managed by Reed Lewallen and owned by Juanita’s Live Music LLC.

Lewallen declined to offer more details about the sale on Friday. In addition to Lewallen, Trey Jordan and Bill Puckett are listed corporation officiers for the LLC with the state Secretary of State’s office.

The asking price for the restaurant is $159,000, and the “restaurant will continue to operate as it has in the past,” according to the news release. It is listed with Nathan Hutchins of Sperry Van Ness/ArkBest Realty LLC. 

Juanita’s has gone through a number of changes in ownership since it first opened at 1300 S. Main St. in 1986. 

The restaurant was founded by Frank McGehee with chef Mark Abernathy, who now owns Loca Luna near Riverdale in Little Rock, as its creative force. The pair’s partnership ended in the late 1990s and resulted in legal disputes over bank loans and property.

McGehee died in 2005. Three years later, Johnny Weaver bought the restaurant from  McGehee’s wife, Lisa McNeir. In September 2010, Weaver sold the operation to Jim O’Brien and Joe Cates.

Less than a year later, in 2011, the restaurant moved to the River Market. At the time, O’Brien said he and Cates couldn’t come to an agreement on lease terms with McNeir, who still owned the Main Street building.

Built in 1950, the 8,000-SF River Market location was previously home to the short-lived Bill St. Bar & Grill, which opened in March 2010 and was closed by December 2010.

But by 2012, O’Brien and Cates had listed Juanita’s was for sale on Craigslist for $250,000. At the time, the owners claimed annual revenue of $1.4 million.

Juanita’s old South Main Street space is now occupied by the Oxford American magazine and the South on Main restaurant, which opened in 2013.