Ark Restaurants Corp. (ARKR) Q4 2013 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good day, ladies and gentlemen and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Ark Restaurants Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2013 Results Conference Call. During today's presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, the conference will be opened for questions. (Operator Instructions) I would now like to turn the conference over to Bob Stewart, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. Good morning and thank you for joining us on our conference call for the fourth quarter and full year ended September 28, 2013. With me on the call today is Michael Weinstein, our Chairman and CEO. For those of you who have not yet obtained a copy of our press release, it was issued over the Newswire on Friday and is available on our website. To review the full text of that press release along with the associated financial tables, please go to our homepage at www.arkrestaurants.com. Before we begin, however, I'd like to read the Safe Harbor statement. I need to remind everyone that part of our discussion this afternoon will include forward-looking statements and that these statements are not guarantees of future performance and therefore undue reliance should not be placed on them. We refer everyone to our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a more detailed discussion of the risks that may have a direct variance on all our operating results, performance and financial condition. I will now turn the call over to Michael.

Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us. This was a difficult year for us. There were some outside influences not under our control. There were some influences that were in our control, but I would like to go over this with you. Our biggest problem was same-store sales. On East Coast, those were impacted by Sandy, especially in Washington and Atlantic City. Atlantic City has storm problems as [gaming] [ph] continues to spread through states surrounding New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania are definitely taking business away from Atlantic City. We still are profitable and looking reasonably well at [inaudible], where we have two operations Burger Bar and Gallagher's Steakhouse and we recently opened in Tropicana a Burger Bar, which we thought given the location [inaudible] would be well and it is profitable and doing pretty well as a return on investment. We hope that continues to gain further traction. In Washington, D.C., our same store sales were down for the year, some of that was Sandy, not very much. More importantly, we have significant competition that wasn't present last year at the Washington harbor location where Sequoia is and we also lost our Restaurant America a while back, and Union Station, our [leases were up, and we are redoing Station] [ph] that space was no longer available to us. We continue to run the Center Café and [Inaudible] grow there and they are actually doing very, very well. Las Vegas, we are being hurt by same store sales. Las Vegas is still not seeing the demand that we need to have positive same store sales. It's not down much. It's down about 3.6% on year. Part of that is New York-New York is undergoing a major construction project right now and that without a question is helping to determine…

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions). I am showing there are no questions. I will turn the call back to Michael Weinstein for closing comments.

Well, thank you. I didn't think I did that good of a good job not having some questions, but people are tired of me, I guess. Thank you. We will see you in three months. Have a happy holiday season, everyone. Thanks.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our conference for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.