Brandon Fox felt that Searcy was the place he needed to be.
Fox grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, but he decided to stay in Arkansas to teach high school students after graduating from Harding University in 2007.
His dream, however, lay outside the classroom. He wanted to open his own burrito restaurant in the town of a little over 22,000 residents. So in 2015, Fox and his wife, Kari, opened Burrito Day near Harding at 108 E. Center Ave.
The decision paid off. Burrito Day has been growing, and in August the Foxes added a front porch dining section to the restaurant, bringing total seating to about 50.
The Foxes aren’t the only Harding graduates who have decided to stay in Searcy and take a shot at running a restaurant.
Slader Marshall decided to open a place featuring pelmeni, the meat-filled dumplings that were a staple of his diet when he was growing up in Juneau, Alaska.
Marshall, 26, graduated from Harding in 2013 with a finance degree and began planning to open a business. “A lot of the restaurants in Searcy … cater to the family of four or the small- town family,” he said. “I thought there was a void as far as what could be provided to students.”
In January 2014, he opened Slader’s Alaskan Dumpling Co. at 301 E. Center Ave., which also is near the campus. And that business has taken off.
“We have grown every month that we have been in operation,” he told Arkansas Business.
Amy Burton, the executive director of Main Street Searcy, said it’s not surprising that some Harding students decide to stay after graduating. “There’s something to be said about living in a small town,” she said.
In addition, millennials in Searcy are following the movement of buying and eating locally, which has helped the new restaurants. “I really think that people are tying into that connection in being a contributing part of the community,” she said.
Burrito Day
The seed for Burrito Day started when Brandon Fox, now 35, was a freshman at Harding and craving the kind of burritos that didn’t seem to be available.
After he graduated in 2007 with a degree in English, he met Kari, who was from Fort Worth, Texas. She was at Harding studying to become a nurse.
They both “got into natural foods and wanted to live natural lives,” he said.
And when they went out for a quick bite, a burrito place was one option that met their nutritional requirements and their budget.
Starting around 2009, Brandon Fox began thinking about ways to open his own burrito restaurant. In 2013, the couple took the leap. They spent about $150,000 on a 3,000-SF brick structure that was built in 1950 and being used as a three-unit apartment building.
The Foxes moved into one of the apartments and began converting the other two into a restaurant kitchen and dining area.
Brandon Fox said Kari developed the recipes with the help of her mother, who had owned catering businesses. He said that he had had experience preparing food in restaurants since he was a teenager.
They decided to stay in Searcy because “we really just loved the community and had a church group,” he said. “We had good relationships here.”
Plus, he said, Searcy lacked the kind of natural-food burrito restaurant that other cities had. “So we wanted to bring that to this area because it wasn’t here,” he said.
In July 2015, more than two years after the Foxes bought the property, Burrito Day opened for breakfast and lunch. By the end of that year, the restaurant was profitable, and Brandon Fox said sales in 2016 exceeded $300,000.
The couple has more growth plans in the near and long term. Within six months Burrito Day will expand its catering services to include business lunches and groups of 20-30.
In a year or two, he hopes to add rooftop seating and begin serving dinner.
Alaskan Dumplings
Born in Little Rock, Slader Marshall moved to Alaska when he was 6 months old. His grandparents remained in Little Rock, and he would visit them over the years. “Arkansas was like a second home for me,” he said.
Marshall’s plans growing up included attending Harding and becoming an entrepreneur. He even toyed with the idea of opening a restaurant in Searcy while he was in school. “Thank goodness I didn’t,” he said. “I probably would have torpedoed myself.”
After he graduated with a degree in finance in 2013, he returned to Alaska for the summer. There his restaurant idea became firmly entwined with the pelmeni he grew up eating.
“I kind of just put two and two together,” he said and thought the time was right to open a restaurant featuring the dumplings in Searcy.
“At the time … there was really not much of anything as far as the landscape for local businesses, especially things that were catering to a younger audience,” Marshall said.
Still, he said, he knew that getting any restaurant off the ground would be difficult.
In November 2013, Marshall invested $9,000 and spent three months converting a 7,400-SF building that once housed Helen’s Dry Cleaners into a restaurant.
Slader’s Alaskan Dumpling opened in January 2014.
“When we started it looked like a prison,” he said. “There was nothing on the walls. It was just the bare essentials that we needed to get operating.”
He said his plan was to show his customers that he was growing by constantly adding decor to the restaurant. The menu consisted of the dumplings.
“We don’t have a salad bar or side order,” Marshall said. “It is the dumplings, and that’s how I always grew up eating them. … That’s what helps us keep the lights on. It’s just that one dish.”
He later added ice cream and coffee to the menu.
The revenue has grown every year, and in 2016 sales were about $200,000, he said.
A year and a half ago, he added a food truck to the portfolio and has taken it to Little Rock. He still wants to grow. His plans include opening locations in Fayetteville and Nashville, Tennessee.
“I think we’re going to wait a little bit and let our brand grow before we string ourselves too thin,” he said.
The quick growth of the business surprised him. “I thought that if we could find a little bit of a niche and do something a little bit different, we might have a chance,” he said. “Three years in we’re surviving and thriving.”