Ark Restaurants Corp.

Greetings, and welcome to the ARC Restaurant's fourth quarter and year-end 2024 results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief 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 of Thank you, sir. 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 September 28, 2024. My name is Christopher Love, and I am the Secretary of Arc Restaurant. With me on the call today is Michael Weinstein, our Chairman and CEO, and Anthony Sirica, our CFO. 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.arcrestaurants.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 condition. I'll now turn the call over to Anthony, our CFO. Good morning, everyone.

You all saw the release. I want to go over a few things on the balance sheet and touch a couple of highlights on the P&L, and then I'll turn it over to Michael. We ended the year with $10.3 million of cash and $5.2 million of debt. Our debt, we have one more set of principal payments on February 1st. We just made payments on December 1st. And the balance of the debt matures on June 1st, which is about $4.4 million. We're in current discussions with the bank to extend our credit agreement and term out the rest of that debt over a number of years, whether it be three to five, and renew the capacity of our existing credit line. With respect to the rest of the balance sheet, there really are not a lot of changes other than the normal amortization of our operating lease right of use assets, as well as an additional impairment of our goodwill, which I'll talk about in a minute. Other than that, our balance sheet remains stable. Currently, we have approximately the same amount of cash, 10.5 to 11 million of cash as of the current date. On our P&L, we have a few items in there that are unusual one-time items. We had the loss on the closure of El Rio Grande, which is discussed in the press release. We made a decision based on the operating results for the last couple of years. to close the property. We tried to negotiate with the landlord for a better lease, but those negotiations have stalled. So that loss includes the write-off of a security deposit, six months of rent that we would owe, some severance and things of the like. That was $876,000. We had the impairment loss on the Sequoia right of use and long-lived assets. That was from The third quarter, that was based on projections. We looked at the numbers again at year end. The numbers improved. So we did not take any additional write downs on Sequoia in the fourth quarter. We were monitoring it on a quarter by quarter basis. We also had an additional goodwill impairment of $4 million. If you recall, we had a $10 million impairment last year. As the Brian Park situation continues to unfold, as you've read in the press release, we engaged outside third parties to prepare a discounted cash flow based on, you know, a series of projections we had given them doing, you know, a probability weighted analysis. And at the end of the day, we felt another impairment of $4 million was necessary. One other item that's going on that's not reflected in the financials, is that our food court in Tampa, the landlord had come to us a couple of months ago wanting to take it back. They want to put a high stake slot room where the food court is. We've been negotiations with them and we feel we made actually a very good deal. We have approximately four and a half years left on the lease and they're going to pay us $5.5 million to vacate the space. There's really a couple small costs involved, some legal fees, some severance, but they're going to, you know, demolish it and, you know, broom clean it. So we would be out of there probably by the end of the year. I think it closed recently, possibly. So we're now in the process of taking any equipment that we want to the locations. So other than that, I think that's all I have. I'll turn it over to Michael.