This Texas restaurant had plans to move into Wichita this year. Then COVID-19 hit.
A little more than a year ago, a Texas-based restaurant owner who worked in restaurants in Wichita between 2006 and 2012 said he was bringing his all-day breakfast restaurant concept to town.
Ashraf “Jordan” Jaradat said that he loved his time in Wichita and that he thought his Chops & Eggs concept would be perfect here. He hoped to open two restaurants, he said, one on the east side and one on the west. He was aiming for 2020, he said at the time.
But that was before COVID-19.
This week, Jaradat told me that he’s holding off on his Wichita plans.
“I love Wichita, but the economy and the market is not strong enough to invest,” he said. “We are going to focus our expansion in Texas.”
Along with his brother, Ramzi Jaradat, he bought the Chops & Eggs in Corpus Christi that had first opened in 2016 but closed after a fire. The two reopened the restaurant in 2019, and they also own a second Corpus Christi restaurant called Ginger Cafe.
Their two new Chops & Eggs restaurants, planned for Corpus Christi and Portland, Texas, are scheduled to open in February.
On Wednesday, the Corpus Christi Caller Times published a story online about the Jaradat brothers and how they managed to keep all of their 120 Chops & Eggs workers employed during COVID-19 by using a PPP loan. It also said that the brothers used $15,000 of their own salaries to pay employees during a weekend of no sales in mid-March, just after the pandemic started.
Their second restaurant, Ginger Cafe, didn’t fare as well, the article said. It had a staff of 15 headed into the pandemic, but post-COVID and layoffs, it now has just 5.
Although the plans for Wichita are postponed, Jaradat said, the option for someone to franchise the concept in Kansas is still available.
He might reconsider next year, depending on the economy and the outcome of the election, he said.
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