Ark Restaurants Corp.

Greetings and welcome to ARC Restaurant's fourth quarter and year-end 2022 results conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Christopher Love, Secretary for ARC Restaurants. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, and thank you for joining us on our conference call for the fourth quarter and year-ended October 1st, 2022. My name is Christopher Love, and I am the Secretary of Arc Restaurants. With me on the call today is Michael Weinstein, our Chairman and CEO, Anthony Sirica, our President and Chief Financial Officer, and Vinnie Pascal, our Chief Operating 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.arkrestaurants.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 direct bearing on our operating results, performance and financial condition. I'll now turn the call over to Michael. Thank you. Hi, everybody.

Thank you for joining us today. The comparisons of the September quarter this year with the September quarter of last year are affected by two segments of our expense side. One is a substantial increase in payrolls and the other is a substantial increase in occupancy costs. In order to try to get the flow of the business Correctly stated of where we are, I want to first have Anthony explain occupancy costs and how the September quarter this year compares to the September quarter last year. What were the big differences? Because there were adjustments last year which sort of inflated EBITDA in the fourth quarter, and there are adjustments this year which sort of deflate are EBITDA in the current September quarter.