Burnsville Hooters shuttered

Minnesota has been a cold place for Hooters. The restaurant known for its wings (OK, and maybe a couple of other things) is now down to a lone location at the Mall of America in Bloomington.

The Burnsville Hooters closed its doors on Oct. 25, leaving employees who showed up for work on payday high and dry.

"It was the end of the month when rents were due, and now the owners aren't responding to phone calls," said one former employee who didn't want his name used. "A lot of us have kids to support. We stuck around hoping things would get better. It's hard to find a job out here. And now we're out in the cold."

Brothers Steven and John Marso once owned three Hooters restaurants in Minnesota. They closed the St. Cloud restaurant in January 2009, and the 4,500-square-foot space recently was sold to White Castle. (The Hooters at the Mall of America is owned by Denver-based Restaurants of America, which operates 20 Hooters, with restaurants also in Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.)

In August the Marsos shuttered their downtown Minneapolis location, choosing to liquidate the business rather than continue restructuring its debt through a prior filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Their holding company, Twin Wings of Minneapolis, owed more than $1.2 million to North American Banking Co., about $440,00 to its landlord in the Block E development, and $35,000 in sales and other taxes to the state of Minnesota at the time it filed for Chapter 11.

$44,084 behind in taxes

The Burnsville Hooters currently owes $44,084 in delinquent taxes and penalties, according to Dakota County property tax records.

Hooters opened in Burnsville in 2004 without much support from the City Council, whose members found the Hooters servers in poor taste.

The reaction was similar two years later from civic leaders in Minneapolis, where taxpayers had put $38.5 million into the Block E development across from Target Center.

The Atlanta-based Hooters chain, with its "delightfully tacky yet unrefined" slogan, has about 455 locations in 44 states and 28 countries, according to its website. The restaurants are more clustered in the South and the Eastern Seaboard, but Illinois has 17 and Wisconsin has seven. There are two Hooters in North Dakota and Iowa, and none in South Dakota.