Bob Evans restaurant in Cape Girardeau among chain's 21 closings

After more than 15 years in Cape Girardeau, Bob Evans has closed.

Over the weekend, boards were hung over the windows, and a sign was placed on the door thanking local patrons for their loyalty.

The news came as a surprise to the staff at the restaurant. Louise Jones was a server at the restaurant from the day it opened in 2000 to the day it closed. She said the staff was told to attend a mandatory meeting Saturday, at which point corporate officials informed them the store was closed and would not reopen after the meeting. The management, she said, was just as surprised, having only been informed 30 minutes before.

A "closed" sign is seen on the front door of the Bob Evans restaurant Monday in Cape Girardeau.

The Vantage Drive location is one of 21 Bob Evans restaurants that closed April 23 or 24. Six more are slated to follow during the 2017 fiscal year. The locations selected were identified as “underperforming” after a unit-level performance review of the company’s restaurant portfolio.

“Business went up and down,” Jones said, “but we thought we were holding our own.”

Jones said the corporate representatives told her the store had cost the company money for the last four years.

Nationwide, about 1,100 employees are affected by the closings. Many employees have been offered positions in nearby restaurants, according to a news release. But Jones said the nearest alternate location to Cape Girardeau was Festus, Missouri, or Paducah, Kentucky, which made staff relocations unfeasible for many. Employees who worked over the weekend to clean the facility after it closed were offered two weeks pay’ as a severance package, she said.

Questions about the Cape Girardeau location and its employees went unanswered when a representative for Bob Evans Farms said the company would not comment beyond the news release and SEC filings.

“Decisions to close restaurant locations are always difficult,” Saed Mohseni, president and chief executive officer of Bob Evans Farms, was quoted as saying in the news release. “Performance at each of these locations, despite the loyalty of valued guests and the efforts of our dedicated employees, was not meeting expectations.”

The company expects the closings to improve annual operating income by about $1 million and estimates $20 million in proceeds from the sale of the owned restaurants.

This is the second Vantage Drive restaurant to close in the last two months.

In March, Ryan’s, in a lot adjacent to Bob Evans, closed when its parent company declared bankruptcy.

The Bob Evans and Ryan’s closings in Cape Girardeau are on the heels of the demolition of Drury Lodge in January — also near the restaurants — to build a new hotel and conference center.

But even when the Drury Lodge was operational and thriving, the restaurant within it, Cedar Street, struggled.

“There’s a lot of growth in Cape and a lot of restaurants, and we felt that impact at Cedar Street,” Ryan Kluge, director of hotels at Drury Southwest, said. “So we made a financial choice to close Cedar Street early, knowing this was all in the works.”

There is a restaurant planned for the new facility but “it will be limited in size,” Kluge said.

Jones said she is confident she will find new employment but is sad to see this stage of her life end.

“Our regular customers, they made our business, and it will make us very sad not to see them every day,” Jones said. “It really will.”

bbrown@semissourian.com

(573) 388-3630

Pertinent address:

156 Vantage Dr, Cape Girardeau, MO