Restaurants close every week. It's a rare Restaurant Transitions column in Thursday's Style section that doesn't mention at least one shut-down.
Sometimes places subsequently reopen in the same or different location. Sometimes other restaurants replace them. Sometimes they just plain stay dead.
Every now and then, when the culinary constellations line up just so, there occurs a genuine restaurant resurrection.
In recent years, we've seen the real, announced and/or planned kitchen comebacks of two legendary Little Rock Italian restaurants and two popular barbecue concepts. Whether they succeed or fall in the long run, or whether those planned resurrections actually take place -- well, if we could predict the future, we wouldn't have to work for a living, would we?
BRUNO'S LITTLE ITALY
Bruno's Little Italy is probably the biggest resurrection success story, and proof that you can't keep a good concept down -- or at least not for long.
Since its founding in the late 1940s, it has operated in one North Little Rock and four Little Rock locations, died twice and come back twice.
Vincent "Jimmy" Bruno, who always insisted his Neapolitan immigrant family was the true introducer of pizza to America in 1903, two years before the "official" historical accounts, opened his original restaurant, the Little Italy Cafe, in North Little Rock's Levy neighborhood in 1947-48, near where he had served -- Camp Robinson -- while he was in the Army. He moved it in 1949 to Little Rock's Roosevelt Road, where it became Bruno's Little Italy.
It thrived there for nearly 30 years, achieving a national and even international reputation, including, in June 1963, the Great Plaque of Honor for Industrial Achievement, the Gold Medal and Diploma of Merit for Fine Cuisine and Gastronomy and the Great Gold Cup Trophy of Honor from the prestigious Fair of Rome for the best Italian food in the United States -- tying, by the way, with New York City's Mama Leone's.
In 1978, Bruno; his wife, Ernestine; sons Jay, Gio and Vince; and stepson Wayne Gilchrist moved it west into a former steakhouse on Old Forge Road, just off Rodney Parham Road. It survived Jimmy's death in 1984 at age 65, until May 1987, when it went under. The official history on the restaurant website (brunoslittleitaly.com/#history) cites high overhead and the '80s real estate crunch.
The restaurant stayed closed for 10 months, Gio Bruno recalls, before dedicated patron Scott Wallace, a Little Rock businessman, reopened it in December 1988 in the Colonnade shopping center on Bowman Curve, even farther west. "Scott missed his toasted ravioli," co-owner Gio Bruno explains. Jay and Vince ran the kitchen. (Jay left in the early '90s to go into the wine distribution business.)
Bruno's closed again in October 2011, the result, Gio Bruno says, of the continuing recession and the westward shift of Little Rock's restaurant scene. It also had never really recovered from an unsuccessful attempt to open a Conway branch several years earlier.
Its second resurrection took place in October 2013 in a redeveloped downtown building in the 300 block of Main Street, with Gio and Vince Bruno now at the helm. Once again, it was with the help of longtime patrons: Real estate developers Jimmy Moses and Rett Tucker, who, like Wallace, had been regular Bruno's customers and wanted to see it come back, and had a vision of it being part of the downtown/Main Street revival they've been working toward for decades.
"I want to thank [them] for our reopening, and down here," Gio Bruno says. The family, having regained control from Wallace over the rights to the name and the business, had been actively searching for some time for a new location but wasn't having much success.
"People were showing us west Little Rock, and that wasn't happening," he says.
It will be five years as of the first week of October, "and we've been prospering here," Bruno says. Much of their business has been event-driven -- audiences for plays and concerts at Robinson Center Performance Hall and, until its suspension of operations in April, at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre -- and from its proximity to the Convention Center and downtown hotels.
"The hotel concierges have been very good to us," Bruno says, and the downtown location has possibly increased media attention. "We've won virtually every award there is since we came downtown," he adds, including newspaper Best Of competitions. And customers have given them outstanding online and social media ratings and reviews.
The availability of free valet parking, which Bruno's shares with the other restaurants on that block (Samantha's Wood Fired Grill, Brewski's Pub & Grub, Soul Fish, the recently opened Ira's and, eventually, the downtown branch of west Little Rock Asian-fusion restaurant A.W. Lin's) is a positive. And the growing number of competitors on that block -- "We're on restaurant row, and I like it," Bruno says -- actually appears to mean more business rather than less. But the lack of available nearby free parking during the day submarined his attempts to open for lunch, first in a next-door deli and then in the restaurant proper.
THE VILLA?
For nearly five decades, The Villa was Bruno's principal Italian competitor. For most of those years, folks ate at one or the other -- but not both.
It, too, moved about the Little Rock landscape, from the 1400 block of Hayes Street, which became University Avenue, moving west to a Holiday Inn on South Shackleford Road, and moving again to Rock Creek Square Shopping Center at West Markham Street and Bowman Road.
It was literally just a stone's throw from the third location of Bruno's. And it closed in October 2012, almost a year to the day after Bruno's closed.
Owner Ken Shivey* vowed at the time that he would someday consider reopening, but there appeared little actual hope of that until Tracye Thomason and David Whitt, owners of Pasta J's West, 14004 Taylor Loop Road, Little Rock, announced in June that they had obtained Shivey's recipes and permission and would be renaming their restaurant The Villa West.
"We were big Villa fans," Thomason explained. Shivey would be involved to some degree in the new project, she said at the time, not as a partner, but possibly showing up in the early days to greet customers. "He's so eager and anxious for them to have that dining experience," she said.
The restaurant was to close or remain open with a limited menu, supposedly in preparation for the change in menu; in part so former Villa cooks could train the kitchen staff; and partially for renovation.
The restaurant did close last month. However, its status, and whether the Villa resurrection will actually happen as planned, is now uncertain. Calls over the course of several weeks to the restaurant phone number and to Thomason have gone unanswered or been transferred to voicemail and several messages left for Thomason have gone unreturned.
CASEY'S BAR-B-Q
Casey's Bar-B-Q closed in the summer of 2005 after 25 years in business and 22 years at 600 Reservoir Road, Little Rock, its third location. Manager Diane Henry Williamson cited her parents' retirement and said she herself was looking for a little easier work. Longtime customers metaphorically, and maybe literally, wailed and gnashed their teeth about it for years in various public fora, including Facebook memory sites.
Then word came in December that Casey's was coming back, in the Little Rock building at 7410 Cantrell Road that the closure of the Arkansas Burger Co. had vacated. After several delays, the restaurant did reopen, in June, with pretty much the identical menu (with the addition of barbecue-stuffed baked potatoes).
It's still a family-run operation. David Henry, son of co-founder Dorine Henry, took on the title of "managing member"; his children, Mary, 25, and Johnny Henry, 22, are the listed owners. And David Henry said Williamson would be on board, helping out on catering and training.
THE SHACK
Casey Slaughter opened The Shack in 1934. It was on West Seventh Street before the construction of some then-new state government buildings drove it out. Its final location, Third and Victory streets across from what is now Cotham's in the City and in the shadow of the state Capitol, closed in July 1988.
But the memory, like the smell of hickory smoke, has lingered for 30 years.
The Shack had any number of lineal and indirect descendents, some of which have claimed they use the original Shack sauce recipe. The list includes H.B.'s in Little Rock, Jo-Jo's Barbecue in Sherwood (which last week suffered a devastating fire and the reopening of which is still up in the air), Smitty's Bar-B-Que and Smokehouse BBQ in Conway and the Smoke Shack in Maumelle.
Late Arkansas Gazette and Democrat-Gazette columnist Richard Allin once put out a call for the original Shack sauce recipe, according to Kane Webb, who detailed the restaurant's history for Sync magazine some years back; he received four different recipes from four different readers.
"The Shack was a legendary place," according to Rex Nelson, blogger, current Democrat-Gazette senior editor and columnist and a confirmed barbecue expert. "The barbecue might not have been the best in Arkansas, but legendary restaurants are about a lot more than food. They're about history, ambience, the people you see there. The Shack had all of that going for it."
Now Tim Chappell, whose culinary claim to fame has been from his Gusano's Chicago-Style Pizzeria, 313 President Clinton Ave., Little Rock, says that, although it has been a yearslong process, he is finally on the absolute cusp of resurrecting The Shack on the Gusano's premises.
All it awaits, he said last week, is final approval by the fire marshal of the fire suppression system. Once he has that, he says, he could at last be up and running by Sept. 1.
The restaurant will resurrect, as much as possible, the original Shack "brand," Chappell says. He's responding, he says, to all that nostalgia for the restaurant, its barbecue -- and its sauce. "The Shack barbecue sauce is the main driving source," he explains. "Shack barbecue is a brand people have been passionate about. We've been championing the original sauce recipe for the last several years," including selling it in bottles at select locations. "We'll modernize our version, but what we won't change is the original-recipe sauce." He's also looking to establish the Shack as a major River Market District blues venue.
BLUE MESA (MORE OR LESS)
By the the mid-'80s, Mark Abernathy had already revolutionized the Little Rock Mexican-Tex-Mex restaurant landscape with his downtown Juanita's Mexican Cantina. He added his pioneering Southwest restaurant Blue Mesa in west Little Rock in the early 1990s. It was definitely ahead of its time, which probably goes a long way toward explaining why it didn't last -- after a brief name changeover to Juanita's at the Mesa, it went under at the end of 1995.
Last fall, Abernathy instituted Blue Mesa Grill Night on Thursdays at his Red Door, 3701 Old Cantrell Road, Little Rock, resurrecting Blue Mesa menu items including Fire Prawns with Habanero Pineapple Glaze, Chile Dusted Scallops with Chipotle Cream Sauce & Cilantro Lime Rice, a Shrimp Burrito with New Mexican Hatch Chili Verde and Queso, and, of course, the Blue Mesa Cheese Dip, which Abernathy has long billed as "The First White Cheese Dip." (He has kept a version of it on his menu at next-door Loca Luna.)
"I thought this would be fun and I am loving reworking these old recipes," he said at the time. "Hardly a week goes by that someone doesn't tell me how much they miss the Blue Mesa Grill or the 'original' Juanita's food we offered."
Abernathy sold his majority interest in Juanita's in 1995 to open Loca Luna. Juanita's subsequently had its ups and downs at its original location, 13th and Main street, before moving to, and eventually going under in, the River Market District.
"Well, the Blue Mesa nights turned out to be a big hit," Abernathy says now. "Everyone wanted me to do it again, so I plan to run 'em again in late October through November (about six weeks).
"I have also been thinking about doing a Juanita's Night theme. Serving the real original recipes I served when I had it from '85-'95. To my knowledge, we served [Arksansas'] first fajitas, the first handmade flour tortillas and one other first: spinach and mushroom enchiladas."
Style on 08/07/2018
*CORRECTION: Ken Shivey is the former co-owner of The Villa. A previous version of this article misspelled his last name.