Azucar Ice Cream. Photo by Kathy Tran
“There is nothing that isn’t slimy about the whole thing,” said Andy de la Fuente, manager of Azucar Ice Cream, Tuesday afternoon.
De la Fuente stood at the front of the shop, which has brought Cuban-inspired ice cream to Bishop Arts customers for the last five years, waiting to pull the door closed each time a customer entered to escape the especially warm June heat.
Difficult to ignore is a black and white photo of a slim man in a chef’s jacket posted on the door next to the store hours. “BOO BOTOLINO,” is written below the man’s face, where red devil horns and eyes were drawn onto the image. “NO ENTRY.”
At the end of July, Azucar Ice Cream will be forced to leave their location at 269 N. Bishop Ave. and will be replaced by Botolino Gelato Artigianale‘s third location. The closure was first reported on by CultureMap.
According to de la Fuente, Azucar is not closing willingly.
De la Fuente said he and his wife who owns Azucar, Suzy Batlle, believed they had reached an agreement to renew their lease for another five years with their landlord, Exxir Capital.
The agreement came after the renewal option period, meaning Exxir Capital was not legally required to renew Azucar’s lease. But de la Fuente said he had felt a friendship between himself and Exxir CEO Michael Nazerian after years of getting to know one another.
When Nazerian told de la Fuente that he had found a backup tenant incase Azucar did not renew the lease, Azucar agreed to match that tenant’s proposed rent in order to stay in the shop. According to de la Fuente, he was told that would be enough to secure Azucar the spot for another five years.
De la Fuente said he struggled to reach Nazerian by phone or email following that agreement. He felt the lack of communication was “disrespectful,” but was not overly concerned by the silence.
“Now I feel he had no intentions of trying to renew us,” de la Fuente said.
According to The Dallas Morning News, de la Fuente received an email on March 15 from Nazerian stating that he had already extended a letter of intention to Carlo Gattini, owner of Botolino, and would be unable to allow Azucar to remain in the shop.
“At the end of the day, I have to honor the agreements I make and the documents that memorialize them….. there is no other way to run the business, and once I have given my word to someone – and that is what I consider an LOI to be – I feel obligated to honor that,” Nazarian wrote to de la Fuente in an an email provided to The News.
In a statement given to The News by Exxir Capital, Exxir said multiple verbal offers were given to Azucar to renew their lease. De la Fuente denies that those offers existed.
“Although we were under no obligation to do so, we made them four good faith offers, well below market price, after they decided not to exercise their legal right to renew, because we loved having them in the neighborhood. They rejected these offers,” the statement said.
For de la Fuente, the ordeal has been “heartbreaking.”
“I would have done anything to keep our store,” said de la Fuente.
According to de la Fuente, he and Batlle built the ice cream shop out of a barebones building at a time that Bishop Arts was just gaining momentum.
The tiles in the ice cream shop were laid by de la Fuente himself, he said, and for the first year the shop was open, Azucar and Tribal were two of the only businesses on the construction-riddled street.
After struggling through that first year and the COVID-19 pandemic, de la Fuente said this was the first year Azucar had seen significant profits. While he hopes to find a new storefront near the Bishop Arts area, de la Fuente is worried Azucar may have to leave Dallas completely. The store has two locations in Florida.
“We are actively looking for a new place,” de la Fuente said. “But this might break us.”
De la Fuente said he feels Botolino will now get to “take advantage” of the hard work he and Batlle put in to turn the space into an ice cream shop. Botolino sells Italian gelato at its Greenville Avenue and Royal Lane locations.
Gattini has been looking to expand the shop into the Bishop Arts area for years, The News reported.
“My agent was informed that the space was available. So we met with the landlord, negotiated and discussed visions and came to an agreement,” Gattini said.
Gattini told The News his LOI agreement with Exxir was not legally binding, so the company could have chosen to renew with Azucar if they had wanted to.
Gattini’s photo is now posted on the Azucar front door. He will be banned from the building until July 31, when Azucar closes to make way for Botolino.
July 5th marks Azucar’s five year anniversary. De la Fuente said the ice cream shop will be celebrating anyways.
“We do want to thank the community, they’ve been fantastic,” de la Fuente said.
Botolino Gelato is scheduled to open by the end of October, 2023, The News reports.
