Downtown GR’s Max’s South Seas Hideaway Files for Bankruptcy
Opening just a few months before the COVID-19 shutdowns began, Max's South Seas Hideaway, a tiki bar and restaurant downtown Grand Rapids, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Max's South Seas Hideaway sits at 58 Ionia Ave SW at the site of the former Waldron Public House, and before that, McFadden’s.
This is the third set of bankruptcies associated with owner Mark Sellers this year, MiBiz reports; he personally filed for bankruptcy in August.
Sellers is the former owner of BarFly Ventures, which operated HopCat, Stella's Lounge, and the Grand Rapids Brewing Company. BarFly Ventures filed for bankruptcy in June. As of last week, BarFly was sold to Congruent Investment Partners and Main Street Capital and will now operate under the new name Project Barfly LLC.
Sellers tells MiBiz he'll “play no role whatsoever” with Hopcat moving forward.
Max's South Seas Hideaway opened in October 2019 and closed mid-March due to the pandemic. Max's reopened in early June with 50 percent occupant restrictions and was able to create revenue again, but "it wasn’t enough to offset its debt", MiBiz reports.
Sellers tells MiBiz business will continue as usual at the downtown Grand Rapids tiki bar and restaurant:
This is a protective move to prevent any of our creditors from coming after us, but we’re not going out of business. We’re staying open normal hours. No layoffs. No one will really notice.