Nash to sell Pinocchio's

Michael Nash announced on social media that he is planning to sell Pinocchio’s.

Last May, Nash opened the restaurant, which had a line out the door with eager people wanting to get their hands on the business’s signature breadsticks. Now, Nash is struggling to pay its liabilities, which he said are around $40,000.

Nash launched the restaurant with $140,000, but he said the restaurant has always been undercapitalized.

“We have a sign out there that doesn’t light up. We can’t afford it,” Nash said.

He said that he had planned to make improvements to the sign, as well as the interior to the restaurant when money started flowing.

He said a big challenge is that it has been difficult to find and keep quality workers.

“We spend time and money training people, and they’ll call in sick. When we are understaffed, we have to shut down the restaurant,” he said.

Many Facebook reviews indicated that the restaurant had odd hours, which made it difficult for customers to predict when it would be open.

“At this point, even if I had reliable labor, we can’t even afford it,” Nash said.

Every morning, Nash is responsible for making breadsticks and prepping the kitchen. He has one full-time worker on staff who he is happy with, but he said he needs good help to help him because when he is making breadsticks, he is not running the company.

“One of the biggest blows to the restaurant is that instead of running and managing it and marketing it, and making posts, I’m doing this,” he said.

He is spending eight to 12 hours a day at the restaurant, but he’s also scared that the announcement of the sale will spur more business.

The purpose of Nash’s post, made Tuesday morning, was to inform the public of a sale of the restaurant, not to save his own stake in it.

“We are concerned that people may panic and that the whole town is going to show up thinking that their last-minute patronage is going to save things,” Nash said. “All that’s going to do is overwhelm us, and we are going to run out of ingredients and leave people upset.”

Nash has already received an offer to buy the restaurant just for the equipment with the intention of liquidation.

“That’s just not on the table,” Nash said. “Either we are going to sell it to someone with good faith and a genuine interest in keeping it going, or we are going to trudge forward until we get a sticker on the door and we’ll have to declare bankruptcy.”

Stephen Tyler Holman, Ward 7 councilor, expressed his regret for the sale on social media.

“The Nash family has put everything they have into bringing back this piece of Norman history. Running a restaurant is perhaps the hardest business to operate in our current time from staffing to cost of goods standpoint,” Holman wrote.

Nash said that since he opened, the cost of lettuce has tripled.

Glen Woods founded Pinocchio’s in 1972 at Stubbeman Village. He closed the restaurant in 2001 after Woods decided to switch careers.

During the 30-year period, Pinocchio’s gained a reputation in Norman as a gathering place where members of the community came together after football games and other events.

Nash convinced Woods to come out of retirement to teach him how to replicate his famous breadsticks.