Crackpot Restaurant Closes Abruptly After Selling Thousands In Gift Cards

By cwalters February 15, 2008

Neil Smith, owner of two Crackpot Restaurants in Maryland, recently shut down one of them and left employees without pay and gift card holders without compensation. Smith says his other restaurant won’t honor the cards because they’re technically owned by different corporations: “He said he’s the sole owner of the Towson location, but he and a group of people own the [now closed] Bel Air location.”

Crackpot owner Neil Smith told 11 News that his bank took over the place, locking all of his assets.

Smith said he’s looking into filing for personal bankruptcy because the Bel Air restaurant has all but sent him into financial ruin. He insisted that he and his shareholders did all they could to keep the location open.

Smith also said he’s in the process of sending paperwork to the bank to try to help his employees, but didn’t give 11 News an answer about the gift cards.

If you live in the area, you might want to reconsider giving Smith any of your business so that he has time to come up with an answer.

(Thanks to S.F.!)

“Closed Restaurant Leaves Customers Without Refunds” [MSNBC]

Tagged With: , , , , ,
«
»

Comments

  1. KJones says:
    February 17, 2008 at 3:12 pm

    I’m surprised that only GIZMOBUB beat me to using the word fraud. There could be no other definition for this.

    And I’m not talking about the customers, I’m talking about the bank. The revenues from the “gift cards” would be considered an asset. If it wasn’t declared as part of the sale, the new owners would have a could case for filing suit.

  2. RamV10: The Axeman Returneth says:
    February 19, 2008 at 3:07 pm

    It seems that maybe 1 or 2 of the commenters here have ever been to this crackpot, let alone the other one on Loch Raven.

    I will go ahead and list the reasons that this place shut down.

    1- It was a block away from the main road that every other restaurant in the area was on.
    2- It was behind a Target, and unless you knew where it was, you’d never find it by accident
    3- It was its own building. Not next to a mall that would draw traffic like most of the other restaurants.
    4- The one on loch raven is what some would call a hole in the wall. Packed every night by the same 100 people, the only bar that I regularly got served when I was underaged, and by far the best burgers in the world.

    The Bel Air crackpot was a great restaurant (though I only went 3 times, the food was good each time). They had a really nice bar setup, one of the best in the area, and the servers were nice. This doesnt make up for the fact that it was just in a crappy location. It also tried to cater to a different set of people than you’d normally see in the ‘other’ crackpot, so the amount of people who’d go to the other one who would 1) be close enough to go to the Bel Air location and 2)be the type of people you’d see in the Bel Air location was surprisingly small. Bel Air is an interesting area in that it’s full of trophy wives and upper middle class people living well beyond their means. Had this restaurant been in a better location (In front of the target that it was behind comes to mind), or had it had they maybe tried to name it something else, it certainly would have prospered.

    That being said, I’m not thrilled about the fact that the employees didn’t get paid, but if best buy went out of business, I wouldn’t raise hell that my gift cards weren’t worth anything.

    I was sad to hear that this closed down last week, I always enjoyed myself there. Good food, good bar, and where else can you get a 20 oz crab cake for only 30 bucks?

« Older Comments