What’s going on with the Whole Hog Cafe at 2516 Cantrell Road in Little Rock?
Whispers has the answer!
Whole Hog is investing between $400,000 and $500,000 in a Wing It Forward restaurant and in a new kitchen, suitable for approval by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The restaurant and kitchen will occupy 6,162 SF, taking up about half of the former Tuesday Morning space, next door to Whole Hog.
That’s according to Chris Maynes, president of Whole Hog. Maynes’ sister, Kathy Blasingame, is the widow of Ron Blasingame, one of the founders of the 12-restaurant Whole Hog chain. Ron Blasingame died in 2009, and Kathy is the majority owner of Whole Hog.
Wing It Forward is a chicken wing restaurant, which first opened in 2019 in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and whose current standalone location is now in Medford, New Jersey. Maynes lives in Haddonfield, New Jersey but travels frequently to Arkansas on Whole Hog business.
The Wing It Forward/Whole Hog combo is a sort of co-branding experiment, Maynes said, that evolved after the Whole Hog team won a best chicken wings competition in 2013.
As for the USDA kitchen, Maynes said that Whole Hog needed such a kitchen so it could eventually start selling its products, such as its ribs, online and ship them across the United States.
He’s hopeful the Wing It Forward restaurant, which will seat 99, will be open sometime later this fall and the kitchen sometime after that. Next week’s issue of Arkansas Business will bring you more details (and they’re interesting!), so stay tuned.
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