May 6, 2021

It has been a big week for the owners of Camille’s Sidewalk Cafe.

Adam and Kayla Wieczorek signed a lease to open a second location in The Empire Mall and became the new owners of Kaladi’s Bistro.

The restaurant at 26th Street and Minnesota Avenue will keep the same name, menu and staff, Adam Wieczorek said.

The couple plans “to keep what everybody loves about Kaladi’s. … So hopefully, everything’s going to be at least as good or better.”

The former owners “were just ready to take our foot of the gas,” said Mark Gillespie, who bought the restaurant in 2013 with his wife, Kaila, and friends Corey and Naida Boadwine.

“It’s a happy exit,” he said. “We’re all great friends. We were just ready to move on to the next adventure.”

Both couples have grown their families since taking over the longtime restaurant from Susie Patrick and her father, Chuck Bahnson. The owners of the Breadsmith stores in Sioux Falls started Kaladi’s in March 2003 and also had a satellite location downtown for several years.

“When you start to have a family and you start to see them grow up so fast, we just wanted to spend more family time,” Gillespie said.

Kaladi’s faced big challenges in the past two years. It struggled through a major road construction project in 2019 and the pandemic in 2020.

“We learned through those two things how resilient we are … how you can face them (challenges) and find success,” Gillespie said.

He attributes that success to the staff and said he’s happy that they’ll continue to make Kaladi’s what it is.

After working through the transition, Wieczorek said he’ll be ready to put that staff knowledge to good use.

“Then, we can actually start spending time getting to know what the team thinks we should do there and make those changes, help them do their jobs better” and create an even better experience for customers, he said.

The Wieczoreks also will be working in the coming weeks to open the second location for Camille’s. The manager at The Empire Mall approached the couple about expanding, and after evaluating the opportunity, they signed a long-term lease.

“It will give us a lot of different exposure to people that might not have already tried it, and hopefully they love it enough to keep coming back and maybe come to this place too,” Wieczorek said.

With the mall’s hours, the new location in the food court won’t offer breakfast and coffee like the restaurant does, he said.

“We’ll see how it goes. I’m not shutting down the idea of adding those back over there, but just starting off, I feel like it’s going to be more of a lunch and dinner crowd anyways. … We’ll still have the pizzas, wraps, sandwiches, smoothies. I think smoothies will do really well over there.”

The couple plans to hire a half-dozen employees and hopes to open the mall location in July, he said.

Editor’s note: The story has been updated since it was first published to correct where Kaladi’s started.