You may have read that Yellow Rocket Concepts of Little Rock, the powerhouse restaurant group, has bought estate sale king Roy Dudley’s property at 1311 Rebsamen Park Road in Riverdale.
Dudley is vacating the site to consolidate his business at his Tanglewood location. “It’s a positive thing,” Dudley said.
Well, Whispers can tell you that Yellow Rocket — responsible for the Big Orange, Local Lime, Zaza and Heights Taco & Tamale restaurants as well as Lost Forty Brewing — paid $825,000 for the 2-acre property, which includes two buildings comprising 11,150 SF.
One of those buildings will be familiar to our mature readers as the Quonset hut that once housed the Wine Cellar. (Good times.)
A growing administrative staff is leading Yellow Rocket to move its corporate headquarters from the Lost Forty site at 501 Byrd St. in east Little Rock to the Riverdale quarters, said John Beachboard, a Yellow Rocket partner.
The company hasn’t opened any new restaurants in the past year, allowing it to focus on operations at its existing restaurants. “That’s meant adding a lot of really, really awesome people and new administrative-level jobs,” among them an HR executive and a social media director, Beachboard said.
The company will remodel the smaller, 5,000-SF building into offices and conference rooms, allowing the company to have its general manager meetings there.
The Quonset hut will serve as storage.
The move will also free up some space at Lost Forty, which will be used for both dry and cold storage along with more fermentation vessels, allowing Lost Forty to add to its lineup of beers.
Lost Forty produced 4,650 barrels of beer in 2015, its first full year of production, and expects to double that in 2016, Beachboard said, estimating it will produce 10,000 barrels this year.
Beachboard said Yellow Rocket now employs 470 workers full and part time.