ZAZA Fine Salad + Wood Oven Pizza announced the closure of its Conway location Jan. 14 via Facebook post, hours after surprising the location’s employees with the same unexpected announcement. 

The Facebook post read, “Today, January 14th, we shared some difficult news with our staff, and now it’s time to share it with you–our community of patrons, supporters, and friends. As of today, ZAZA Conway is officially closed.”

“Despite our best efforts over the past several years, we’ve come to the realization that this location is no longer sustainable. The restaurant industry is full of challenges and unpredictability, and while we are excited about the future of ZAZA in Central Arkansas and beyond, it’s still incredibly hard to close the doors on our Village at Hendrix, Ellis Ave. location.”

The post is no longer available on the ZAZA Facebook page.

Emberlynn Pendergraft was a trainer at ZAZA and had worked there for two years. 

She said, “I was led to believe that we were coming in for a quarterly training from HR. I’m not sure if it was a miscommunication…but I was told personally that it was training…I came into a 9 a.m. meeting thinking we were about to get trained because we just switched to a new system. Instead, we were sat down with a bunch of people from corporate who I’d never met before. [They] said, ‘Hey, we’re closing the restaurant. Here’s 30-day severance.’”

Griffin Deitrick, UCA alumnus and former cashier and salad line worker at ZAZA said the meeting was supposed to be the day before.

“Instead, they just gave us an extra day and then on Tuesday, I came in and all of upper management was there and they looked really depressed and I immediately knew,” he said.

Pendergraft said, “So the people who were there longer kind of had a feeling. I didn’t ever think that it was going to happen like this. That’s for certain. It was always kind of implied that if we were to close down, we were going to get a warning, or someone would say, ‘Hey, we’re going to cut back on your resources.’ Because it happened so abruptly I don’t think anyone really processed what was happening. Even with checks in hand, we were all a little dazed and confused.”

Deitrick said even the general manager didn’t know until 30 minutes before the meeting that the location was closing.

Deitrick said, “They even had the opening people that were supposed to be doing prep come in that morning and do prep for three hours. So the restaurant was ready to open…We apparently even had hired one person, like two weeks before this, and then they had hired someone the night before so they had just hired somebody new right before the closure.”

Deitrick said they were given a bunch of reasons as to why the restaurant was closing. 

“The main one was just that the place doesn’t make money, apparently, which I think they mostly blamed on the rent but also I think just it slowed down so much which kind of seems to be the vibe for that whole Hendrix village thing,” he said. 

“There was some yelling, there was some crying. Most people just were like, ‘Well, time to move on,’” he said.

“There was kind of a mass group trip to the unemployment office and to banks afterward,” he said.

Pendergraft said, “They weren’t necessarily the kindest to their employees and they kind of abused our trust so I can definitely see why they would think that some employees would [quit if given more notice of the closure] but it’s also upsetting, because a lot of these people are like single parents, and all of a sudden they’re out of a job.”

Deitrick said, “Yeah, I would have liked a heads up, because the severance was just based on our working wage, which for most people, is minimum wage, so we didn’t get tips included in that. So really, the amount of money we could have gotten for those 30 days got really slashed, and it just would have given [us] more time to kind of be looking around. And also, I feel like if people knew that ZAZA was closing, more people would have come to it and I would have hiked up tips. So, it seemed like the cheap way to kind of get us all out the door.”

UCA student Alli Wildman said she worked at ZAZA for eight to nine months in the pizza line and as a food runner. 

“I didn’t work there nearly as long as the others, but it was one of the best places I’ve ever worked at, solely because of all the people that were there, and I know a bunch of people got screwed over by this thing, so I really feel bad for them,” she said.

“It would have been nice instead of 30 days severance, give us a 30-day warning,” Wildman said.

“So a lot of us are still pretty close. We’re more like a family, which is very cliche to say, but some people really did find their chosen family,” she said.

“Some employees that I know of still don’t have a job, and they’re the employees that have been there the longest or have families that they need to take care of, and [ZAZA] was how they did,” Wildman said.