Title

Presentation

Operator: Greetings, and welcome to the Ark Restaurants Second Quarter 2025 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Chris Love, Secretary. Thank you, and you may begin.

Christopher Love: Thank you, operator. Good morning, and thank you for joining us on our conference call for the second quarter ended March 29, 2025. My name is Christopher Love, and I am the Secretary of Ark Restaurants. 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 newswires 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 a direct bearing on our operating results, performance and financial condition. I’ll now turn the call over to Michael.

Michael Weinstein: Hi, everybody. I’m going to turn it over to Anthony to try to explain a little bit better the financial data that we’ve put forth in the press release, but I will uncomplicate for you.

Anthony Sirica: Yes, sure. There’s a couple of things in here that require explanation. At the end of the quarter, our cash balance was $11.1 million, that was up actually approximately $900,000 from year-end. Our debt was down to $4.3 million as a result of principal payments made during the quarter. As we discussed on previous calls, our credit agreement expires on June 1. We are working with the bank, and we’re in the process of finalizing a new facility with our current lender, which will provide somewhere between $15 million to $20 million of total capacity. The current $4.3 million will be termed out over a 3-year period. As you saw in the press release, there are two significant noncash items in the current quarter, the first of which is a goodwill impairment.

As you’re aware, we look at our goodwill on an annual basis, but we’re also required to see if there are any triggering events in an interim period based on a decline in our stock price at the end of the quarter. We went through the analysis, and we had to write off the balance of our goodwill in the amount of $3.4 million. Unfortunately, that is a point-in-time test. And if the stock goes up, you can’t put it back on the books. It’s a noncash item, but it’s unfortunate as far as the timing. We also have the uncertainty surrounding the Bryant Park leases, which we’ll discuss obviously, at length, which factored into the analysis. In booking that write-off, it then caused us to be in a cumulative loss position for purposes of analyzing our deferred tax assets.

So based on that analysis, we then had to impair — I’m sorry, put a full valuation allowance on our deferred tax assets of $4.8 million that will continue to be looked at every quarter as things improve. So it’s possible that, that valuation allowance could be released in future quarters or years. But right now, we had to put a full valuation allowance on that. So that caused the massive tax rate that you see there in the P&L. With respect to the rest of the balance sheet, there really weren’t any significant changes other than the goodwill write-off and the write-off of the valuation allowance on the deferred taxes. With that, I’ll turn it over to Michael.

Michael Weinstein: Thank you. So I want to save the discussion for Bryant Park and Meadowlands for the latter part of my discussion. Primarily, what you should know is the EBITDA this quarter, the March quarter was negatively affected by some $650,000 of consultancy fees and legal fees in conjunction with our fight to retain the Bryant Park lease. So if that had not been the case, the EBITDA would have shown an improvement over the comparable quarter last year. First, I’d like to go through the various venues. Alabama continues to be just very steady. We’re doing well there. The New York restaurants, Robert is doing well. The Florida restaurants seem to have picked up from comparable periods last year in terms of revenue on a whole.

The Washington, D.C. restaurant, we have new management. I see some improvement there. The big improvement is coming from Las Vegas. We’re considerably more efficient than we’ve ever been there. While volumes are steady, we’re — the cash flows weekly are improving dramatically. We did a cash flow analysis for the bank in conjunction with our new credit facility, and we did that not on a fiscal or calendar year, but they wanted it as of April 1 through of this year through March 30 of next year because that coincided with the question of whether we would keep our Bryant Park facility or not. And we did that, I guess, in February and March. I would tell you that we’re probably running $2 million ahead of that projection in terms of our operating cash flow.

So things are improving. We’re still looking at deals. We hope that we’ll be able to close on a couple of things we’re looking at in the next few months. But the important thing here is the Bryant Park situation. So as you know, our leases expired on April 30th. We are a holdover tenant. We have filed the claim in New York Supreme Court, which is a lower court in New York making allegations that basically request for proposal process was corrupted that the basis of the claim is that they’ve chosen a tenant, at least the Bryant Park Corporation has chosen a tenant, which has not yet been approved by the Parks Department of New York City Library, whose approval is needed, but they chose a tenant whose initial bid in the RFP proposal reply was $1.2 million when we were already paying $3.1 million that the percentage rent deal was literally 4 points lower than ours that they intend to close the restaurant for over a year, that they’re asking for free rent of 18 months and that they’re asking for a tenant improvement miles from the park.

All of this just speaks of a process that no other landlord would allow to replace a tenant paying substantially more, who’s been in business for 30 years and running one of the largest grossing restaurants in the United States. There is no reason for this to have occurred other than a conflict of interest on the part of the Bryant Park Corporation executives. So we have a case filed in Supreme Court. It will take probably one year or 1.5 years to make its way through. In the meantime, we expect the landlord to start an eviction proceeding, which will probably be subsumed by the Supreme Court until our case is fully heard. So we think we’re definitely there for the next year, 1.5 years. We hope at some point, there’ll be a political settlement to the situation.

But right now, we’re operating and we’re not going anywhere. In response to questions about Meadowlands, we’ve always said that the Meadowlands possibility of getting a casino license is dependent upon New Jersey moving in response to downstate New York City casino licenses. Those have not been issued yet. We — from what we read and from what we hear, that will happen sometime before the end of this year. They’ll allocate the three licenses. One will go to Yonkers for sure, one will go to the Aqueduct for sure, where the third one goes is still up for grabs. But once that happens, we think New York State will recognize that they’ll be sending New York State residents from the northern part of the state, which has very well-to-do demographics to New York City to gamble, and they’re not going to want that to happen, and the Meadowlands is in the best position of any location to satisfy the demands for casino gaming in Northern New Jersey.

So those are the two big issues with us. The rest of the business seems to be doing fine. And I would say to you that we think it’s going to continue to improve. And we’re out there hunting for deals. So that’s the plan. I’ll take questions at this point.

Operator:

Michael Weinstein: Okay. Thank you, everybody. Speak to you next quarter.

Anthony Sirica: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. This does conclude today’s conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.