Ark Restaurants Corp.

Greetings. Welcome to the Arc Restaurant's fourth quarter 2020 resource conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listening only mode. A question and answer session will follow the call. Anyone who requires operators during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Sonal Shah.

Thank you, operator. Good morning and thank you for joining us on our conference call for the fourth fiscal quarter ended October 3rd, 2020. My name is Sonal Shah and I'm general counsel of our freshmen. With me on the call today is Michael Weinstein, our chairman and CEO, Vinnie Pascal, our chief operating officer, and Anthony Sirica, our chief financial officer. For those of you who have not yet obtained a copy of our press release, It was issued over the news wires yesterday and is available on our website. To review the full text of that press release, along with the associated financial tables, please go to our homepage at www.arcrestaurant.com. Before we begin, however, I'd like to read the Safe Harbor Statement. I need to remind everyone that part of our discussion this morning will include forward-looking statements and that these statements are not guarantees of future performance. and therefore undue reliance should not be placed on them. We refer everyone to our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a more detailed discussion of the risks that may have a direct bearing on our operating results, performance and financial conditions. I'll now turn the call over to Michael.

Hi, everybody. So to discuss revenue by portfolio, each part of the country. Florida has been pretty much consistently open from June when they allowed us to reopen. Some restrictions are in place, but revenue coming from Florida, even though the restrictions included at various times, shortened hours, and still include 50% occupancy, most of our Restaurants are in Broward County, so it's 50% occupancy indoors, social spacing, outdoors, but we are experiencing pretty good volume levels given the pandemic, and I would take a guess that in any given week, if you took all these Florida properties together, we're probably down 20% as a whole from pre-COVID conditions. So Florida's been quite good in generating cash flow. The only thing that we are a little disappointed in is the volumes of JB's, which is a spectacular beach location, but JB's tends to have a significant portion of its business to be an older clientele, and we think they've just abandoned the idea of eating out, even if it's in outdoor cafes. Alabama has been very good. Again, once they lifted restrictions, we're still operating under 50% guidelines for indoor dining. But both of our restaurants in Alabama have done curbside pickup, and they're busy. I would say to you that during the summer when Gulf Shores was in – We were exceeding buy-ins that we had prior year, somewhat because of curbside delivery, but just people looking for things to do, and restaurants in Alabama seem to be that alternative, which replaces any other social activity. Las Vegas, we were doing well until recently. We're right now in... The slowest part of our season in Vegas, historically. But Vegas has put a 25% cap on indoor dining and on the number of rooms that casinos can have available. So our business has been hurt dramatically there. It's half of what it was three or four weeks ago. But again, it's a slow season. I'm not so sure there's demand for more things. Very much more demand than 25% of room capacity right in this period. Once Christmas Day comes and buying picks up, we used to have million-dollar weeks in that period. We're not going to achieve that again, especially with these restrictions. So Vegas, which went from some cash flow, is now negative cash flow a little bit, not terrible. I'm sure it will improve once we get out of this three-week period, which is the slowest part of our year there. Washington, D.C., we were doing well throughout the summer. In Sequoia, we had 600 outdoor seats. They were doing well. We were generating some decent revenue. But as of a couple of days ago, indoor dining has been closed. at Sequoia will be fully closed at the end of this week. We had some mild weather. We tried to keep the outdoor open this week, but economically it doesn't work. And we'll be closing the whole thing temporarily until the restrictions are lifted. The goal of the mayor is to lift the restrictions January 15th. New York... New York was losing money. Every single restaurant we had throughout the summer, even with Brian Park's outdoor cafe seats, we just can't get payroll and rent to a place that the equation makes sense. Volume at Brian Park literally was 10% of what it used to be, even throughout the summer. Over this whole thing with our bigger restaurants, Sequoia, Brian Park, Robert in New York. You know, there are no events. Social distancing makes it impossible to load up on customers and revenue. So New York was especially hard hit. Brian Park, again, did 10% of what it used to do. Robert, 10% of what it used to do. There are no outdoor seats at Robert with 25%. Occupancy allowed throughout the period before outdoor dining was closed last week. You know, we were doing 10% of what we used to do. Clyde's, same story, no outdoor seats, indoor seating restricted to 25%, 10% of what we used to do. El Rio Grande, we have outdoor seating. It did fairly well during the summer. Thank you for joining us. With one exception in New York, which is Bryant Park, we're out of business right now. We're out of business in Washington, D.C. We're restricted dramatically in revenue in Las Vegas. Florida and Alabama are okay. You may ask the question, why are we open at Bryant Park at all? Well, we have a landlord and a lease that requires us to be open. were trying to renegotiate the rent. There was some abatement of rent during the period up until now through December 31st. Obviously, January, February, and March, we're going to need help, and we're going to go back to the landlord. We have a call scheduled.