An even grander project will emerge from an extended pause in the timetable to build a hotel-event center at Pine Bluff’s Saracen Casino Resort. The Quapaw Nation is revealing more details about its phase 2 plans as the budget has escalated from $155 million.
“We’re all in,” said Carlton Saffa, chief market officer for Saracen. “We put in $300 million so far for the casino and restaurants. The new space will cost an additional $200 million to build and furnish. If you like the Capital Hotel in Little Rock, you’re going to love the hotel at Saracen.”
The 400,000-SF addition will house an enhanced 1,600-seat event center and 13-story hotel tower with a slight increase in the room count to 326, about half of which will be suites of various configurations.
The Saracen hotel will be the largest in Pine Bluff and one of the biggest in Arkansas. Its capacity will be larger than the 20-story 300-room Southland Casino Hotel in West Memphis and the eight-story, 198-room hotel at Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort in Hot Springs.
Flintco, the Tulsa general contracting firm that oversaw construction of the $108 million Oaklawn casino-hotel, will handle Saracen’s hotel-event center.
“We expect to go vertical by the second quarter,” Saffa said of the new construction. “But I’ll let the arrival of the cranes speak for themselves.”
The Quapaw Nation’s Business Committee approved spending $5 million for remediation work on the hotel-event center site to accommodate a reworked floor plan. Much of that investment is focused on modifying the addition’s foundational concrete that was poured during the casino construction.
The casino opened in October 2020. Phase 2 work was poised to begin last year after the governmental response to COVID-19 and the ensuing supply chain disruption threw off the original schedule. But substantial tweaks to the hotel-event center plan ate up 2022.
“We’re finally getting back to it, and as it turns out, we need more of everything,” Saffa said. “The scope of the work changed, and there were a lot of pivots that had to occur.”
Among the changes: a restaurant and bar that will augment the lobby. Formal names for the eatery and watering hole are works in progress.
“We’re referring to it as Three Meals because it will serve breakfast, lunch and dinner,” Saffa said of the new dining option, which will be restaurant No. 5 at Saracen. “As far as the bar goes, we may end up calling it the Lobby Bar, but again we haven’t named it yet.”
The Saracen Casino is home to the Red Oak Steakhouse, Legends Sports Bar, Quapaw Kitchens Buffet and Saracen Express.
Joining the lobby lineup will be an upscale coffee shop and a jewelry store, operated by Sissy’s Log Cabin out of less than 1,000 SF next door to the Saracen gift shop.
“We don’t do outside vendors or outside retail,” Saffa said. “But we consider them the Tiffany’s of the South. We wanted a little bit of that and made an exception to that rule.”
Completion of the hotel-event center is viewed as a two-year project.
“We’re behind schedule regarding the hotel,” Saffa said. “That’s the elephant in the room. If it takes us three years to do a hotel, so be it.”
Construction of a 650-space parking deck, envisioned to help boost patronage on rainy days, is likely to begin after the hotel’s completion, according to Saffa. The goal of the staggered building schedule is to avoid the disruption of simultaneous construction on two sides of the gaming floor.
“If we can weather inflation and the pandemic, the sky’s the limit,” Saffa said.
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