The BayHaven Restaurant Group has scrapped plans to open four new food ventures at Camp North End, according to published reports.
QCity Metro reported last February that the company, owned by the husband-wife team of Greg and Subrina Collier, had reached a deal with Camp North End to open Passage Seafood, The Abyss, Bird Is The Word and Beyond Amazing Donuts.
[Also read: BayHaven Restaurant Group to open four new restaurants in 2022]
Now those plans have been tabled, according to the Charlotte Business Journal, which first reported the news.
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In a statement published in the Journal, BayHaven said the decision to pause the projects was triggered by “the changing economic climate and construction costs.”
All four concepts, initially set to open in 2022, would have been Black-owned. At least two of the four were set to be led by people trained by the Colliers, whose signature restaurant, Leah & Louise, is located in Camp North End.
Plans continue for the Colliers’ breakfast-themed restaurant, Uptown Yolk, which is set to open this year in South End.
Despite their setback at Camp North End, the Colliers have not abandoned dreams of further expansion. In an interview with QCity last month, Subrina Collier said she and her husband continue to seek the right opportunity in Historic West End, a growing area where community leaders have long called for more dining options, especially sit-down restaurants.
“We’ve been trying to come on this side of the community for years now,” Subrina Collier said while attending a Northwest Corridor Council of Elders meeting at Johnson C. Smith University.
“Nothing is in stone,” she emphasized.
“We love the west side,” she added. “It’s just more so coming about it the proper way, coming over here. We do so much over here on this side, we want to actually be here.”
The National Restaurant Association estimates that 1 in 3 restaurants don’t survive their first year.
Toast, a Boston company that offers cloud-based services to the restaurant industry, lists economic headwinds as the #1 reason why restaurants fail. Lingering effects from the Covid-19 pandemic and related worker shortages continue to bedevil the industry, the company said on its website.
Despite adding 128,000 jobs in January, the leisure and hospitality industry still trails its pre-pandemic employment level by 495,000 jobs, the U.S. Labor Department reported last week.