Popular Fayetteville Restaurant Opening Rogers Location

The owner of a popular restaurant in Fayetteville said Monday he hopes to have a second location open in Rogers by May 1.

Scott Bowman, owner of Theo’s Bar and Dining Room near Dickson Street, said the Pinnacle Hills location, on the first floor of The Shoppes at Pinnacle Hills, will be more informal than the original, focusing on the lounge, patio and bar atmosphere rather than the formal dining.

Reservations will not be required at the new location, a 4,900-SF space that was formerly home to Eddie Haskell’s Patio and Grill.

That restaurant closed suddenly Jan. 11. Rick Harris, the owner and general manager of the upscale restaurant/night spot, has not responded to telephone and email messages from the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal seeking comment.

Bowman, who heads up Bowman Hospitality Group along with his father, Ted, said the same service and atmosphere that made Theo’s popular will be apparent in Rogers.

“What we want to do is re-create the same lounge atmosphere without the entrees and without reservations,” he said. “That’s really it. You can still get a great meal there and there will be lots of food to choose from, it’ll just be done more informally.”

Bowman opened Theo’s in 2005, one block north of Dickson Street on Campbell Avenue, in the 4,500-SF ground floor of the two-story Rollston Building Condominiums.

He and his father bought the space for $950,000.

The Rogers space is being leased from Hunt Ventures. Bowman declined to discuss the terms. The space is currently undergoing renovations.

“Luckily, the previous owners did a great job of building the space out, so a lot of the core stuff is there for us and we get to utilize that,” Bowman said. “But [the renovation work] is a huge amount of cosmetic-type stuff. Lots of new flooring and a total interior re-design.”

Bowman said the Rogers location will allow Theo’s to better serve “a pretty strong client base who come down and eat and drink with us.”

He said the high-quality infrastructure of existing restaurants will help build a foundation for his Benton County operation.

“It’s exciting for us to go to Rogers, which in my opinion has spent a lot of time and effort the last four or five years to develop a pretty good restaurant base,” he said. “We’re happy to join that. You’ve got Basil’s, Bonefish Grill and Ruth’s Chris all right there and all drawing a good amount of people all the time. It’s just a good market for us. We’re excited to do basically the same thing we do [in Fayetteville], just a little bit more informally.”

Theo’s had $1.1 million in total sales on food, beer and wine in both fiscal year 2010 and 2011, according to data provided by the Fayetteville Advertising & Promotion Commission. The fiscal year in Fayetteville runs from December through November.

Another of Bowman’s restaurants, East Side Grill at 1838 N. Crossover Road in Fayetteville, is also performing well, the restaurateur said.

Since opening last summer, the eatery reported $274,472 in food, beer and wine sales in its first four months.

“It’s performing well,” Bowman said. “It’s not a huge place but, boy, we sure serve a lot of meals. We had about a 90-minute wait last Friday night. We’ve been very lucky.”