Five Points breakfast, lunch and tea restaurant The Café on Lumpkin will close after Sunday, Nov. 3. Owner Luke Martineac confirmed the news in a phone call with Flagpole and said that although he’s disappointed, he doesn’t see negativity as helpful. The restaurant isn’t closing because it’s not successful. Instead, it’s due to new landlords, who bought the building in August.
Martineac said that the new owner wanted to increase his rent but hadn’t given him a specific number right at the beginning. They agreed on a month-to-month lease, which was in place until the owner proposed a $3,000 increase in monthly rent. Martineac says that the owners then changed their minds and decided to renovate the building. The month-to-month lease meant that he had just a short period of time to figure out what to do.
Although Nov. 3 is the last day of business the café has a few days after that on the lease in which to sell off equipment (Martineac put his own money into the business rather than taking on investors and would like to recoup some of that) and move things out. Martineac said that he’s working on trying to help all his employees find new jobs and that some of them have been with the restaurant since it opened, four years ago.
The Café on Lumpkin has been the hot breakfast, coffee, pastry and sometimes lunch supplier for the Rushmore, the bed and breakfast down the street, which is in the process of looking for another business, ideally local, to step into that role. Martineac says he doesn’t plan to find a new location because it’s difficult to find one where his business would succeed in the same way or have a similar atmosphere. He doesn’t know what the new owners, the Powell Property Group, plan to do with the building, but thought perhaps it could become an event space.
Powell is based out of Cumming but run by some University of Georgia alums and owns several rental properties and condos in the Five Points area. Martineac says that the building, which is listed as having been built in 1950 on the tax assessor’s website, actually dates to 1917 or 1918 but is not officially designated as historic. The upstairs is zoned residential, while the downstairs is zoned commercial.
Martineac said to be on the lookout for some closing events, perhaps the weekend of Oct. 26.
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