Hurricane Ian crushed a good portion of the grand Sanibel Island business dreams of Jeramie and Debra Campana.
Over the past few years, the husband-and-wife team opened four businesses on Sanibel: The Paper Fig Kitchen, 400 Rabbit, the Fig East and Tutti Pazzi, an Italian restaurant in what for many years prior used to be Matzaluna.
Now, the Campanas are picking up the pieces of two of their four businesses, having lost their cars and the use of the ground floor of their home from the Sept. 28 storm.
400 Rabbit, their Mexican-themed restaurant at 975 Rabbit Road, will not be coming back, Jeramie Campana said. Unable to afford flood insurance, Campana and his landlords cut ties.
A legal notice on the window of the restaurant served notice to Campana and his 400 Rabbit business partners that they owe the property owners $157,802 to settle their debts, including $20,000 for October rent.
“It had nothing to do with the hurricane,” Nancy Niesel, who owns the 400 Rabbit building through the Nancy Niesel Trust, said of the legal notice.
The Niesel Trust purchased the property in 2008. Nancy Niesel said the trust was compelled to serve legal notice in order to rehabilitate the building and get it ready for a new tenant.
“It was already in process,” she said. “They were failing long before the hurricane. It started over a year ago. It’s sad. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out. We’ve been very lenient with them. I think they spread themselves too thin. I’m sorry it had to happen that way. But sometimes things happen.”
Niesel has her own problems with which to deal, including losing her Shalimar Cottages at 2823 West Gulf Drive, which completely washed away, as well as her Fort Myers Beach properties. All of her properties have mortgages due, though.
“It’s just sad,” Niesel said from her summer home in Washington state. “Sanibel, it will never look the same. It can’t. It’s impossible. But you have to go on. You can’t dwell on the past. You have to go forward.
“I don’t even have a home to go back to. My home is gone, too. I’ve got to pick up the pieces and move forward.”
The Campanas are trying to regroup. Jeramie Campana said he may have to part ways with Fig East. Of his other two businesses, the first in line to reopen likely would be the Paper Fig Kitchen, a deli at the Tahitian Gardens shopping center off Perwinkle Way.
Tutti Pazzi, an Italian restaurant off Periwinkle Way, received minimal damage because it was built up and did not receive any storm-surge flooding.
“We’re just trying to get our feet wet,” Campana said of starting these businesses. “And now our feet are really wet.”
Campana spoke in between tearing out everything inside the Paper Fig Kitchen.
“The landlords are having all the units in Tahitian Gardens gutted as mold prevention,” he said. “We appreciate that. The tough thing is getting everything out of here. There’s a lot of heavy restaurant equipment. With the lack of movers and storage units, it’s been tough trying to coordinate how to get this stuff out and get it somewhere safe, so we can get it back in here and reopen.”
Since 1974, Sanibel Island’s codes have not allowed for chain restaurants, other than the ones that have been grandfathered in such as Dairy Queen or the ones that have started there like the Lazy Flamingo and Doc Ford’s. This means small business owners such as Campana will have to figure out a new way forward.
Last week, Sanibel small business owners convened at Spoondrift Island Bowls, a restaurant adjacent to Bailey’s General Store, to meet and grieve. It helped, Campana said.
“It was nice to see you’re not the only one,” he said. “You know you’re not. But then you get to see everybody else. You don’t want that for them, and they don’t want that for you. At the end of the day, we’re all in the same boat. And we’re all just trying to navigate this and get ourselves back open.”
