A high-profile restaurateur is taking a sharp detour from once-ambitious expansion plans to focus on the surviving locations, with the aim of building them back up to where they were before two years of financial turbulence took a heavy toll on them.
The Place 2 Be restaurant owner Gina Luari said she will concentrate her efforts in West Harford, downtown Hartford and New Haven, which, she said, all remain profitable ventures but not nearly at the levels that they once were. Further expansion is not on the radar, for now.
“That’s far beyond the scope right now,” Luari said. “I really just want to focus on the [restaurants] that we have and make sure they get back to being stable and what they were.”
Luari is coming off a bruising two years marked by rent disputes and pushes for evictions by landlords and tax troubles with the state. Luari points to financial setbacks tied to incidents of flooding, embezzlement and vandalism that she alleges figured in evictions at The Place 2 Be at the basketball hall of fame in Springfield; RAW*, a seafood bar in downtown Harford; and The Place 2 Be-themed bakery in Hartford’s South End.
Luari also was evicted from a second bakery location in West Hartford’s Blue Back Square that never opened. That bakery is the subject of fresh litigation from the landlord over rent payments. Luari said she has sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars of her own funds into the project.
And Luari faces eviction at The Place 2 Be restaurant in Blue Back with a deadline at the end of March for moving out, also tied to allegations of unpaid rent and other troubles.
Perhaps the lowest point came in September, when Luari was arrested on felony larceny charges for passing a bad check for about $11,000, a case that is still pending.
The turn of events is a stunning one. As recently as 2023, Luari — founder and chief executive of The Statement Group, based in Hartford — drew national attention for turning the concept of brunch — once considered ho-hum — into a hip, all-day affair with cool decor tailor-made for Instagram.
Luari’s most recent comments came in an interview earlier this week that was part of an outreach to media after months of saying little publicly, especially after her arrest on criminal charges. She addressed social media comments that some of her employees went unpaid, whether she expanded too quickly and speculation that she might be forced to file for bankruptcy protection.
Skeptics say Luari’s troubles are rooted in an expansion that was too fast-paced, spanning just five years. But Luari, who opened her first restaurant in 2016, disputes that, pointing to traffic at her restaurants that justified the growth.
“Looking from the outside, I can see how that appears,” Luari said. “And I can see how people come to that conclusion. But the [restaurants] were doing very well. It wasn’t as if we expanded too fast and diluted our customer base. Each restaurant had a three-hour wait.”
Luari acknowledged that there may have been instances when employees didn’t get their paychecks on time.
“There were times when our accounts had temporary freezes because we had different issues with either [the state department of revenue services] or when everything was going on or when we were closed because of the floods and the fire and all those things,” Luari said.
“So probably there were periods of times when things got held up. But there has never been anybody that has left our company and not been paid,” she said.
Luari said, “Anytime something has come to our attention, we have addressed it immediately.”
She pushes back on the notion that she will be forced to file for bankruptcy protection to put her current troubles behind her.
“I don’t think so,” Luari said. “That’s an interesting question because the businesses are fine. There is no need. They’ve obviously taken a hit. We’re trying to rebuild.”
Looming over any plans to move forward is Luari’s arrest on charges that she passed a bad check on the purchase of restaurant equipment from a longtime supplier, Restaurant Equipment Paradise in East Hartford, according to the arrest warrant.
In the interview, Luari said she mistakenly wrote checks to the supplier for the equipment from an account that was closed and that she has never said she was not going to make good on those payments.
But Ken Swerdlick, owner of the equipment supply business, said there was little communication between his company and Luari in the days after the incident. which took place five months ago. That was the reason, Swerdlick said, he went to the police.
“The problem is she wrote them out of two closed accounts, and she knew what she was doing,” Swerdlick said. “She was trying to buy time. She’s very smart. There’s no way that you own a business, have two checkbooks — and to say, ‘Oh, the check was already stamped, I figured I could use it.’ That means you have no control over your business. She controls everything. She knows.”
And despite her focus on the three remaining Place 2 Be locations, time may be running out for West Hartford.
The landlord, Blue Back Square Capital Partners, has secured an order through the courts that Luari must move out of the storefront at 50 Memorial Road by the end of March.
Luari said the date was chosen because it is the end of her current lease and a lease extension “just wasn’t on the table at the time.”
“We’ve done very well at this location,” Luari said, in a booth at the West Hartford restaurant. “We’re probably the longest-standing brand at this location. And we’re looking to renew the lease. And I hope to be here another five years.”
Blue Back, the landlord, declined to comment.
Kenneth R. Gosselin can be reached at [email protected].