Exclusive: Why star restaurant South is closing despite a Sacramento judge’s order

South co-owner N’Gina Guyton shocked Sacramento food lovers when she announced her Southside Park soul food restaurant would close at the end of the month.

Among those surprised: Ian Kavookjian, South’s co-owner and Guyton’s ex-husband, who wants to keep the restaurant open.

“I was shocked, because I heard it secondhand,” Kavookjian said. “South is doing well, and people love it, and there’s no reason to shutter it.”

He went to court to keep the restaurant open, and he won — at least on paper. Kavookjian secured an emergency order prohibiting Guyton from closing South, although she has no intention of running the business past this week.

He’s also seeking even more from his ex-wife and business partner. Kavookjian wants rights to restaurant recipes built on her family heritage.

Guyton adapted many of South’s star dishes from family recipes with roots in Mississippi and Louisiana. That includes the restaurant’s fried chicken, arguably Sacramento’s best and a passion project advertised in the restaurant’s website URL, weheartfriedchicken.com.

Kavookjian is white, and Guyton is Black. To her, the thought of losing ownership of those Southern recipes is impossible to swallow.

“I’ve never been more angry in my entire life,” Guyton said. “It’s literally ... an analogy to slavery. You want me to stay open and work for you, so you can collect a paycheck. You want to take something that belongs to me, that’s part of my family and my culture and my heritage, and sell that so you can collect a paycheck.”

Don’t expect South to remain open after Thursday, despite the judge’s orders. All employees have put in their two weeks’ notices. Guyton plans to quit on June 30.

Kavookjian can find new staff and oversee the restaurant before South’s lease expires July 31. The landlord also has offered a one-month extension to Aug. 31.

“If Ian wants to come in and run that restaurant, he can. But I’m done. I have to be,” Guyton said.

Kavookjian, though, hasn’t worked at South in years for medical reasons. He began asking Guyton to buy him out of his 50% ownership stake in summer 2021, last seeking $1.3 million in February.

As customers bid teary-eyed adieus to South’s fried catfish and hush puppies, he’s trying to keep the restaurant alive through the local court system.

“Opening a small business and running it in California, especially in the food and service industry, is extremely difficult,” Kavookjian said. “We hit a home run with South. It doesn’t need to close.”

South’s roots

Natives of New Orleans and New Jersey, respectively, Guyton and Kavookjian carved out independent careers in the Sacramento-area restaurant scene before meeting at Il Forno Classico in Gold River and marrying in 2005.

They opened a catering company called Private Events by Eight in 2009, then the short-lived Eight American Bistro in Granite Bay in 2012. That was enough to build heated anticipation around South, which opened in 2014 in a 100-year-old building that once housed a Chinese grocery store.

Guyton and Kavookjian’s restaurant stood out in the modern Sacramento dining scene even before the fried chicken craze swept the United States. Thrillist called South’s burger the city’s best in 2017. The restaurant made The Sacramento Bee’s first-ever Top 50 Restaurants list in 2021.

Kavookjian was the front-of-house face in those early years — “the mayor,” according to Guyton. She preferred to stay out of the spotlight, handling administrative duties. Responsibilities changed over the years, and both ultimately wore many hats, cooking and managing as needed.

Kavookjian began spending less time at South after developing a severe case of the gastrointestinal disease diverticulitis in 2017, and stopped working there altogether shortly after he and Guyton separated in September 2019, she said.

Guyton, too, took a step back in early 2020 to start a farm in North Sacramento, which is now being sold to fund the legal fight. She resumed working at South five days a week earlier this year.

The two had their divorce mostly finalized in July 2021, but still needed to separate their business partnership, which Kavookjian’s attorney Kurt Hendrickson said couldn’t be properly valued at the time due to the pandemic.

Guyton and Kavookjian went back and forth on a ball-park buyout amount — he wanted something in the $500,000-$1 million range, she offered closer to $100,000 — before Kavookjian solicited California Business Valuations’ business in September. The Los Angeles-based firm estimated South’s capitalized earnings value, its anticipated profits based on current revenue and expected future performance, to be $2.7 million.

Kavookjian then asked for half that — roughly $1.3 million in exchange for his 50% ownership stake — in February. In a letter from his attorney, he threatened to break up their corporation Eight American Bistro Inc. through Sacramento Superior Court’s involuntary dissolution proceedings unless she paid him that amount.

Guyton responded in April by saying she’d agree to dissolve the corporation and close South. But while Kavookjian was willing to take a hefty buyout to walk away from the restaurant, he didn’t want to see it close entirely.

Kavookjian offered to buy Guyton’s 50% share of the restaurant — taking sole ownership of South’s name, alcohol license and recipes — if Guyton signed a non-competition/non-solicitation cause that would prohibit her from opening a similar restaurant nearby.

Guyton rejected that offer, and the two sides began making plans for mediation last July. Then Guyton announced South’s impending closure in a video on social media June 3.

Long lines at Sacramento restaurant

Customers have formed hour-long lines outside South during the restaurant’s final days. The last time it was that busy was June 2020, as people sought to support Black-owned restaurants amid George Floyd protests.

That community appreciation is a large part of what once made Kavookjian and Guyton talk about South as the restaurant that could stay open for an entire century, he said.

“It has a vibe, it has an energy, it has the food,” Kavookjian said. “The company has these recipes that Sacramento loves, and that’s been proven time and time again. I don’t want to see that end.”

Guyton doesn’t necessarily want to stop serving those dishes, either. But she’d rather do so than see Kavookjian — or someone else — take ownership of them.

“I think about my family’s handwritten cookbooks and cookbook cards and being taught those recipes, being taught my mother’s fried chicken by my mother, being taught my grandmother’s gumbo by her,” Guyton said. “That’s legacy, that’s tradition, that’s my family’s history. And you’re willing to take that from me so that you can sell it to the highest bidder? So that someone else can just go Colonel Sanders my family? For money? ... It’s atrocious.”

To Kavookjian, those recipes are intellectual property associated with the restaurant he helped build.

“We incorporated to protect those (recipes), and keep them with the business. And they’re going to stay with the business. That’s just how it works,” Kavookjian said.

That legal fight over the recipes will keep Guyton from serving any of South’s dishes at her new upcoming restaurant, Miss N’Gina. The solo project in “central Midtown,” according to an Indiegogo page that had crowdsourced more than $10,000 as of Monday, is expected to open this summer.

South’s menu was rooted in what customers associated with Deep South soul food. Miss N’Gina will challenge those preconceived notions of Southern food, pulling dishes from across the Gulf Coast, as well as Arizona, Northern Mexico and Native American cuisines.

Guyton and chef Willie Torres, a holdover from South, will mine cookbooks for 100-year-old recipes and adapt them for modern Sacramento palates.

“At South, our gaze was narrow. We really just focused on food from Mississippi by way of Louisiana, strictly family recipes (with) a little tweaking,” Guyton said. “With Miss N’Gina, we really want to expand the Southern food lexicon.”

Meanwhile, Kavookjian will try to keep South open without Guyton or any of the recent staff, though he doesn’t seem too concerned about personnel replacement.

“One of the things I’ve learned in 25 years of working in restaurants is a lot of times, no matter how much you feel like you are the integral part of the team and it can’t run without you, the reality is you quit, you move onto another job and the restaurant remains open and it runs,” Kavookjian said.