HotBox Express Restaurant and four other Palmetto businesses sidelined by cooking fire
Five businesses in a strip shopping center in Palmetto had to close their doors over the weekend after a cooking fire broke out in a food trailer parked behind one of the businesses and spread to the main building.
The fire at HotBox Express Restaurant, 551 17th St. W., started shortly after 1 p.m. Saturday, spread into the eaves of the restaurant and sent smoke through the attic into the other businesses.
Damage was estimated at $50,000 to property and $5,000 to contents, according to a report by the North River Fire Department.
Although the fire department quickly got the fire under control, power and water to the building had to be turned off, and repairs have to be made before the businesses can reopen.
Shopping center landlord Jim Amerson was at the center Wednesday, trying to reassure tenants.
“We are moving rather rapidly. The city has been great in quickly getting us demolition permits. We are waiting for the insurance adjuster to come in. We hope to have power by the weekend for the businesses that had no fire damage,” Amerson said.
“We will treat this end of the building like a new construction zone,” Amerson said of the businesses that suffered most from the fire. We hope to have everyone up and running in two to three months.”
New air conditioning, new wiring, and new trusses are among the repairs needed, he said.
“We will get through it. I feel bad for my tenants,” Amerson said.
Joe Morris and his partner, Mikel Ervin, owners of HotBox Express, said they launched the business about five weeks ago, and business had been good.
“We were having a great day. We offer barbecue on Friday and Saturday and a lot of people were coming in to get ribs and chicken,” said Morris, a former football star at Palmetto High School.
Morris and Ervin stepped away from the trailer for a few minutes to attend to business inside the restaurant and that’s when the fire broke out.
The partners had been saving up for a proper hooded cooking stove, and had been temporarily using the trailer, which was destroyed in the fire.
“We had people crying out here,” Morris said of the fire. “People had been saying something good had come to the neighborhood. We had repeat customers every day. It was literally like a reunion with church people and classmates.”
Chuck Sanders, owner of the King Koin laundromat next door to HotBox, was among those temporarily out of business.
“No power,” he said.
There is damage to repair, too. Lots of smoke damage, he said, looking at the blackened ceiling and yellow insulation that covered the floor.
“I started getting all kinds of calls Saturday afternoon, saying ‘you had better get up here,’” Sanders said of the fire next door.
Morris and Ervin say they aren’t ready to quit.
Encouraged by the success they were enjoying before the fire, they believe they have found a good niche.
“The hope and prayer is that we can reopen in a couple of months,” Morris said.
“We also want to give back to the community, to some of the places that I went when growing up, like the Palmetto Youth Center and the Palmetto Boys & Girls Club,” Morris said.
The partners are planning to meet with Palmetto city officials to hold a 5K run, and they have set up a gofundme page at https://www.gofundme.com/f/rhbnk6-hotbox-express.
“We are saddened and disheartened, especially for the other tenants of the building,” Ervin said.
