Strip center once home to Tight Ends, Tutors has new owner who’s courting new restaurants
The strip center that went up on the busy northeast corner of Kellogg and Seneca back in 2019 seemed promising when it first opened.
It was home to a sports bar — Tight Ends — that was controversial because of its scantily clad waitresses but was also busy during its first months of business. And at the time, developer Abdul Arif said he planned to also open a Huddle House in the strip center — and maybe a high-end grocery store as well.
Now four years and a global pandemic later, the strip center is empty except for a nail salon called NailTime. Tight Ends, the center’s anchor on the south end, re-branded as Clutch House in 2021, but that restaurant closed less than a year later. It was followed by the short-lived Tutors Pizza, which left the space after only six months.
And that Huddle House never opened — a victim of COVID-19 uncertainty.
Now, though, the center has a new owner. Hamid Bakhtiari, owner of local MobileComm stores and of various commercial properties around town, bought the center about a month ago, and he’s making plans to help it live up to its original potential.
“It’s really good real estate,” Bakhtiari said this week. “It’s two acres on Kellogg with great access. There’s no reason that Douglas and Seneca is more developed at this point in time. You’ve got 20,000 cars a day going north and 110,000 on the highway that can see the building and can see the sign.”
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Bakhtiari said he envisions a neighborhood sports bar in the space that formerly had Tutors and Tight Ends/Clutch House. And the space on the opposite end also is built out for a restaurant, he said. Huddle House was close enough to opening that the space already had its grease trap and power installed. And it’s situated in a way that it could also support a drive-through.
He said he’s in “active talks with a couple of national groups,” but he’s open to hearing from other restaurateurs interested in the spaces before he lists the property with a broker. Ideally, he said, restaurants would open in the spaces within a year.
Bakhtiari also said he plans to split off one side of the large Huddle House space to make room for one more business in the center, which would be just north of Nail Time. The former Tight Ends space has about 6,000 square feet, and the would-be Huddle House space with drive-through potential on the north end has about 3,000 square feet.
Anyone interested in the spaces should call Bakhtiari at 316-519-4717.
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