One Arnold restaurant is expected reopen near the end of the year, and another restaurant in the city closed its doors for good early this month.
Alex Dziuba, the Arnold Pasta House franchise owner, said the restaurant, 921 Arnold Commons Drive, may reopen in mid-December. The location has been closed since March 14 when it was nearly destroyed by a tornado that swept through Arnold.
The Sugarfire Smokehouse restaurant, 2204 Michigan Ave., closed on Oct. 3 after nearly three years of operation there, according to a social media post on Oct. 1. Calls to one of the restaurant co-owners were not returned.
Pasta House
Dziuba previously said he had hoped to reopen the Pasta House in September.
“We have had a lot of delays and things up until now,” he said on Oct. 3. “I just hope everything keeps going the way it is, and we may reopen in the middle of December.
“There is no other way to describe it. It has been tough. When you get as much damage as we had, the insurance company is always trying to find ways to reduce expenses. That is what delays things, when they try to find different avenues for the restoration.”
Dziuba said the restaurant closed early on March 14, so no customers were in the building when the tornado came through Arnold. However, he said a manager and four employees were unable to leave until after the tornado left the area.
On Oct. 3, Dziuba said crews had applied the first coat of paint and put up tiles inside the restaurant, and a new floor was expected to be installed this week.
“We have to redo the whole dining room floor,” he said. “We had a special epoxy floor, so they have to grind down the old floor to the concrete.”
Dziuba said the restaurant will have the same layout as it did before the tornado, but the interior decorations will be new.
“It will look different,” he said. “We will be the same place we were before, but the colors will be different. There may be some new items on the menu.”
Dziuba said the restaurant has 65 employees, and he has been able to continue paying those employees because he has business interruption insurance.
Dziuba said he is looking forward to reopening the restaurant.
“It will be nice to be back in the restaurant business instead of the construction business,” he said. “We are still quite a bit out, about two and half months away. We play it one day at a time. Every day we come in and try to make things move forward.”
Sugarfire
The restaurant’s social media post did not say what led to the decision to close the Sugarfire location, which was called Sugarfire 55 and opened in January 2023.
“After much thought, we have made the difficult decision to close Sugarfire 55 in Arnold,” the post said. “While this chapter is ending, we are deeply grateful for all the moments shared here.”
Gregg Medeiros, Tom Lombardo, Tyson Long and John Brauch owned the Arnold restaurant. When they opened the restaurant, it was the ownership group’s second Sugarfire location, and it was the franchise’s 16th location in the St. Louis area.