Greetings, and welcome to Ark Restaurants' First Quarter 2018 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Bob Stewart, President and Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead, Mr. Stewart.

Okay. Thank you, operator. Good morning and thank you for joining us on our conference call for the first fiscal quarter ended December 30, 2017. With me on the call today is Michael Weinstein, our Chairman and CEO; and Vinny Pascal, our Chief Operating Officer. For those of you who have not yet obtained a copy of our press release, it was issued over the Newswire yesterday 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 bearing on our operating results, performance and financial condition. I’ll now turn the call over to Michael.

Hi, everybody. One of the big factors in this December quarter was the fact that this year, New Year’s Eve fell into our March quarter of fiscal 2016, when last year, it fell in the December quarter. It’s hard to quantify what that cost us in terms of EBITDA but in a way, that might be helpful. For the 6 weeks ending February of this year compared to last year, we’re up excluding sales in Sequoia. But away from Sequoia, we’re up about $1.1 million in sales. We’re not up $1.1 million in ordinary business, it’s just the flow of New Year’s Eve into the present 6 weeks that’s impacting that number on the upside. We’re still up in comp sales but not by that much. And so the influence of having that 1-day switch of New Year’s Eve impacted EBITDA. Again, it’s not quite quantifiable but it was a big factor. Generally, in that quarter, the December quarter just reported, one of the big influences again was Sequoia. You almost have a look at Sequoia as a startup. We’re carrying way too much payroll as we train people in the December quarter. That has come down now. But the September, October, November, December periods, we’re doing a lot of training. What is gratifying is that Sequoia over the December quarter compared to the prior December quarter was up 13.7% in sales. So the P&L might not look this good but the top line is looking very good. And we’ve always been good at getting the equation right, in getting all the elements of running an operation of this size in line. So we’re very encouraged by the sales. And the second thing about being up 13.7% is that since Sequoia did not open until late summer, we had a…

[Operator Instructions] And gentlemen, we have no – and we have a question from the line of Robert Meador, a Private Investor.

Do you have properties in Atlantic City? And if so, how are those doing?

Well, we do have properties in the Atlantic City? We have Gallagher’s at Resorts. And across the hall from Gallagher’s, we have a burger bar. And we also have a burger bar in – Broadway Burger Bar at the Tropicana in Atlantic City. Those properties have been pretty good for us the last few years. Although in the quarter that we just reported, we were down about 4% in comp sales which represents some $66,000 differential from the prior year. That probably was affected by New Year’s. So I don’t think we’re really down. The Resorts property is probably going to benefit from the new Hard Rock property because it’s sort of a pathway from one to the other. And based upon if the new Hard Rock property, which is the old Taj Mahal property, and I toured that recently, if that becomes successful, they don’t really have enough capacity for food and beverage at the Taj Mahal. And when old Taj was open, we used to benefit from the fact that they were under-restaurant-ed at the old Taj. So hopefully, the Resorts property will benefit from the opening of the Hard Rock. The Tropicana property has been just fine. It’s not a home run, it’s a double. It just sort of does the same thing year in and year out. It’s run really well. It’s contributed a nice amount of operating profit. Nothing special about Atlantic City obviously in terms of the whole town. It’s struggling. Casinos are down to, I think, seven operating casinos. With Hard Rock, it will be eight. But again, you have Philadelphia building a new casino. And that might impact all of Atlantic City. But we’re fine, just doing fine.

Alright, thank you.

Well, thank you.

We have another question coming from the line of Jeffrey Kaminski with Family Office Consulting.

Hi. Good morning, gentlemen congratulations on a nice quarter. Just a question for you as a long-time shareholder, I know that you instituted a corporate buyback years ago as a safety net to be, for example, it’s not particularly liquid stock and that’s – how do you, a, plan to institute that buyback? Or perhaps pay a special dividend or something to reward shareholders? I was curious as to what’s

So part of the question came out garbled. But let me answer what I think I heard. The stock buyback that we put in place – first of all, we have bought back some 300,000 shares, 250,000 to 300,000 shares a few years ago from a deceased shareholder. That was when the stock was about $10, $11 a share. But that’s three, four years ago, maybe as much as five. When we made our purchase of our limited partnership position at the Meadowlands, it occurred to us sometime after that as we were becoming more confident that the likelihood of a casino license being issued to the northern part of New Jersey by the legislature, as we contain more confident, we said to ourselves, nobody is paying attention to what value of this could be. And it may be at some point that a license is issued and it becomes a yawn and nobody is really aware of how much additionally we thought could be sitting out there for us. And we said, let’s institute a shareholders' buyback with that in mind. That was done about 8 or 9 months for a referendum that was passed by the state legislature in New Jersey in 2016, which eventually failed. So given that it failed and that EBITDA is postponed for another day, the potential for that EBITDA until it gets back on the state legislature’s calendar, if it ever does, we decided to do nothing. So we haven’t bought back any stock and it still sits there. But potentially, the other reason to have a stock buyback is our stock is thinly traded. We’re very comfortable with the company. If a block became available, I presumably would take a look at it. Assuming our balance sheet can handle it, we would take a look. But the main purpose was because of what the activity in the Meadowlands when the legislature put up a referendum for a casino license in the North. I hope that answers your question.

So a follow-up, I had probably gotten – I had mentioned the dividend. Is there any consideration of an increased dividend or a special dividend in the future?

So our business has changed a little bit in terms of its focus. We – the 4 properties that we have purchased, Rustic Inn, Shuckers in Florida and the 2 Alabama Oyster Houses, we not only purchased the operating entities, but we purchased the land and buildings that support it. So essentially, we’re sitting with some $17 million to $20 million worth of real estate. And those deals are very attractive deals. We’re buying them on an average of 5.5x trailing operating profit. So if you look at it and you say, hey, I got – if I’m buying a deal that has $1 million in operating profit and I’m paying $5.5 million for it and the land and buildings come with it, what did I really pay in terms of a multiple? Well, the answer is this: if it’s making $1 million, and let’s say I wanted to sell the property and I said to the guy that’s buying the property, what are you going to pay me for this property? I’ll guarantee a $500,000 a year rent for 20 years. I think they may pay $5 million, $6 million for it. So I’m really not paying very much for the operating profits, if anything. That deal is a better deal for us, not only for that reason, but also we become our own landlord. And one of the things that has decimated our EBITDA here in the last 3 to 4 years, we’ve lost $6 million in EBITDA to leases that terminated that we couldn’t renew because either banks have gone through the roof or landlord developments have reconfigured their space and decided they didn’t want a restaurant there. So for a variety of reasons, we prefer to be owners now. That has put pressure on our liquidity.…

Thank you.

My pleasure. Thank you.

Thank you. gentlemen there are no additional questions at this time. Would you like to make a closing remark?

All right. We’ll see you next quarter. We’ll see how we do. Thank you.