The old Long John Silver’s building has been through a lot of ups and downs lately. After over 20 years of selling fast food fish, the franchise owners decided in 2007 to close the doors and leave town, supposedly over a dispute about grease traps.
The building sat empty for two years, until finally a new tenant started moving in, the Sugarplum Bakery, which was relocating from Genoa to Carson. It opened last June, but only lasted about three weeks before closing their doors too. The bakery later relocated to Minden, but the Long John Silver building still sat empty.
Over the last few weeks I’ve seen activity around the building, so I thought there might be a new tenant in the works. And indeed, early this morning I drove by to find a sign had gone up for Lily’s China Bistro. I’ve never heard of it before, but that could be good news, a new business owner trying to make a go of it.
This is right next door to the old Burger King, which is still in the process of being converted to Super Burrito, another local business that already has three stores in Reno. So if the national franchises are leaving and locals moving in, that could be a good trend towards bringing Carson City’s economy back to life.
Seems to me to be the best kind of growth- local businesses, not franchises. Yeah, franchises are locally owned, but what happened to one’s business having it’s own personality? The restaurants we remember the most fondly are individual, not chains…
Looks like Gardnerville is getting Super Burrito too! It is good to support local independent businesses when we can.
Hard to imagine anything riskier in business than opening a restaurant in Carson City. Places need to offer tons of value when competing against
the great buffets like Fandango. The Sugarplum was sure a strange deal-how did they plan on building a customer base in 3 weeks?
Restaurants need to offer value for every dollar-and it is a very
tough business.
Any truth to the rumor that BK decided it would be a better business decision to open a brand new franchise out at Topsy than to bring this old building up to code?
The owners of Burger King said as much in a Nevada Appeal article. ?Carson has moved farther south, so we are looking for a location father south.? So not necessarily Topsy, but they definitely want to be closer to the freeway.