Locking the door to fine dining

Locks Pointe Restaurant and Hodad's Bar & Grill will serve its last meal today after 23 years of offering one of the few fine-dining experiences in Chesapeake.

Located on the Intracoastal Waterway, just north of the Great Bridge Bridge, the seafood restaurant will open at 2 p.m. today and serve until the food runs out, said co-owner Karl Dornemann. The River Boys will provide entertainment for the farewell.

Dornemann said he and business partner Eric Stevens decided March 28 to shutter the cedar-sided establishment. He said they talked to several interested buyers, but reached no sale. Dornemann said he and Stevens also talked to adjacent land owners about razing the building and building condominiums, but those plans did not work out.

Dornemann and Stevens purchased the restaurant in April 2005 from Cassell Basnight, a Chesapeake attorney whose firm launched Locks Pointe in January 1985.

"When we took it over, it was on a six-year downward spiral," Dornemann said.

The bridge was in the midst of being replaced when Stevens and Dornemann purchased the restaurant and the previous and new owners thought business might pick up once that major road construction was completed. It didn't.

He said the age of the building became another issue, and he and his partner couldn't invest in a major facelift. They set up a separate company to buy the property, but it filed for bankruptcy in December. Dornemann said that when that news became public, it amounted to an almost $70,000 drop in sales in one month.

The revenue loss, the inability to redevelop the property coupled with an overall economic downturn created what Dornemann called a "trifecta."

"It's costing us more to operate than to shut it down," he said.

Dornemann, 38, said he has opened nine restaurants in his career, and this will be only the third one he's had to close - not bad, he added, considering how seven of 10 restaurants nationwide fail in the first five years.

He and Stevens co-own Bardo Edibles + Elixirs in downtown Norfolk, and are preparing to open the Still, a new eatery in Portsmouth's Olde Towne.

Kevin Armstrong, 222-5202,

kevin.armstrong@pilotonline.com