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Transitional Woes Mount for Feastros

3 min read

Mark Spaight, owner of the former Jacksonville eatery Feastros, hasn’t succeeded in finding a new location for his 14-year-old restaurant.

Spaight has hunted for possible facilities in central Arkansas since Feastros closed in April, but as of last week he’d looked fruitlessly for places from Little Rock to Lonoke to Cabot and to the towns in between them.

Spaight might have to give up on reopening, he told Arkansas Business last week. He’s currently looking for both a job and a Feastros location; whichever pans out first will determine Feastros’ future.

Spaight originally opened Feastros in 1998. He served up Southern foods like catfish and barbecued ribs from a concession cart in North Little Rock.

Feastros ended up in Sherwood for about eight years, starting in 2003.

Early in 2011, instead of renewing Feastros’ Sherwood building lease, Spaight said he’d made a verbal commitment to expand the restaurant in an old pizza place in Jacksonville. Spaight wanted to grow Feastros into a buffet, so he chose a 3,000-SF space in Jacksonville over the 1,200-SF Sherwood spot.

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The Jacksonville location appears now to have been ill-fated from the start.

As Spaight prepared to close his Sherwood restaurant, he said he discovered that his future landlord, C.J. Cropper with Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investors in Little Rock, had reneged on the verbal agreement and rented out the pizza place to First Street Cafe.

Spaight said he scrambled for a second-best location since he was losing the Sherwood lease, had ordered food already for reopening and suddenly was without a building.

Spaight hurriedly leased space from Cropper in the same shopping center as First Street Cafe. He also agreed to serve food only from 3-9 p.m. so as not to compete with First Street Cafe, despite his desire to open a lunch buffet.

The new space Spaight rushed into wasn’t equipped to be a restaurant, so reopening lagged due to the necessary $60,000 in equipment and renovations. The lack of cash flow hindered his ability to pay the total bill for the first order of food that he was forced to store. The food supplier, Performance Food Group of Richmond, Va., sued Feastros for making payments on a more than $8,000 bill instead of paying the total balance, Spaight said.

Once the restaurant did open in May 2011, business was slow for most of the hours between 3 p.m. and 9 p.m., so his landlord agreed to let him start serving lunch. But there was quibbling with First Street Cafe about the lunch menu, Spaight said, and First Street’s owners complained that some side dishes served violated the noncompete agreement.

In December 2011, Spaight filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy with $168,140 in assets and $112,029 in liabilities.

On April 13, 2012, Spaight’s landlord notified him that he had seven days to vacate the building at 2126 N. First St. The landlord, Cropper, later cited the December bankruptcy as the reason.

Neither First Street Cafe owner Kevin Elrod nor Cropper immediately returned calls seeking comment.

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