HopCat Restaurants Sold To New Owners, Emerge From Bankruptcy

HopCat fans can celebrate as the restaurants will survive the bankruptcy.

After filing for bankruptcy about five months ago, BarFly Ventures, who owned the restaurants have sold the business to new owners. The company was purchased by two investment firms, Congruent Investment Partners and Main Street Capital. These two firms came together to purchase BarFly Ventures for $17.5 million and created a new company called Project BarFly LLC.

Back in June, at the time of filing for bankruptcy, the owner of BarFly Ventures Mark Sellers, said that the company was over $30 million in debt. BarFly Ventures also owned other restaurants including Grand Rapids Brewing Company and Stella's Lounge in Grand Rapids. The new owners were actually lenders to BarFly Ventures back in 2015.

We know the business extremely well from our experiences over the last five years. We strongly believe in each restaurant concept and intend to return the company’s focus to providing a unique, best-in-class customer experience...Our goal is to focus efforts around the company’s key markets and ensure HopCat, Stella’s and Grand Rapids Brewing Company remain a thriving part of these communities...said Travis Baldwin, founder of Congruent Investment Partners. 

In this new deal, there are 11 different restaurants under new ownership in the following cities:

• Holland
• Ann Arbor
• Detroit
• East Lansing
• Kalamazoo
• Indianapolis
• Lincoln, Nebraska
• and two HopCat restaurants, Stella's Lounge, and Grand Rapids Brewing in Grand Rapids

The CEO of Project BarFly, Ned Lidvall, said there are around 500 workers in the new company and new jobs are being added.

Source: MLive