Tim Doherty

American Staff Writer

Stuart Gates’ plate has been fairly full since he opened The Depot Coffee House and Bistro in downtown Hattiesburg.

But when the opportunity presented itself to put his spin on another iconic downtown eatery and nightspot, he was not only flattered, but intrigued.

Gates will take over operations at Walnut Circle Grill at the end of the month from owner/executive chef Mike McElroy.

“I was flattered when Mike called and him wanting to keep it with someone who’s a downtown person,” said Gates, who also serves as The Depot’s executive chef. “We have a following here and they have a following there, and our primary focus on reopening is going to be not only retaining the former customer base, but growing it and implementing our spins on service and our cuisine and making sure that we’re all ears when it comes to feedback.

“We’re not going to start with an illustrious, five-page menu. We’re going to start small, we’re going to get that streamlined and we’re going to grow with the space. We’ll run several specials to see what the guests are liking and go from there.”

Saturday will mark the final day not only under current ownership but also under its current name.

Gates, 39, said when the restaurant reopens in mid-July it will mark the debut of Vicki’s On Walnut.

“Vicki, that’s my mom,” Gates said. “It’s for her.”

Walnut Circle debuted 12 years ago as a part of the McElroy family domain that started with a need for a pharmacy building and wound up encompassing nearly the entire block of Walnut Street between Main Street and West Laurel Avenue.

McElroy, 49, said business has been good of late, but that it was time for him to get back to his family’s basic business as owners/operators of nursing homes.

“I never had any inclination that I was going to be in the restaurant business,” McElroy said. “I’m in the nursing home business, and I’ve got three (nursing home) projects in the works. I’d kind of stepped away from it for a long time, and I’ve got to take care of this.

“We’re building a home in Picayune, I’ve got another one that’s basically a gutted building on Cahal Street that sat for a couple years and now we’re building it back up, and we also purchased some property at the back end of the Tatum project out on Veterans Memorial Drive.”

McElroy said when he started sounding out friends and fellow restaurateurs about potential candidates to step into his role on Walnut, Gates was the name that kept popping up.

“We thought long and hard about it because it was time for me to get back to what I needed to be doing,” McElroy said, “and so I talked to a lot of people around town about who would be a good fit for a Hattiesburg person, and it all came back to Stuart.”

Gates opened The Depot in October 2010, and the coffee shop-extraordinaire with the eclectic lunch menu and heavy-duty catering business blended seamlessly into the downtown Hattiesburg business quilt.

McElroy first approached him in March about leasing the property at 115 Walnut St., but Gates said he couldn’t consider the offer properly until the summer.

“I mentioned to him that I wasn’t quite able to do that with our wedding (in-house and off-site catering) schedule, but during the summer, I might be able to readdress that, so that’s what we’ve done,” Gates said. “He and I made an arrangement, and the logic there was just basically so we could retain as much of their staff as possible.

“Obviously, we want to convey that it is a new restaurant, but it will indeed be in that same amazing space. We’re not going to try and redefine eclectic, Southern cuisine, but we do want to get in there and put our spin on eclectic Southern food.”

Gates said he plans to continue Walnut Circle’s tradition of serving as a venue for live music.

McElroy said he wasn’t sure what to think when Gates hesitated.

“It took some talking for me to kind of get him,” McElroy said. “To me, it was like, ‘Dang, I’m giving you a restaurant,’ so I was kind of baffled by it.

“But when I stepped back and took a look at it, for me to come out of the blue and say, ‘Hey, come in and take over this restaurant,’ I mean, it was totally unexpected, number one, and number two, he had nothing in the works, as far as what the menu was going to look like and what kind of business plan he was going to have. It didn’t take me long to figure out why he was dragging his feet, and if you’re a smart person, you probably would have done the same thing.”

Gates said the 125-seat Vicki’s On Walnut initially would serve dinner, opening Tuesday through Saturday around 4 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. while also handling the catering at the nearby Walnut Room.

Whitney Miller of Poplarville, winner of the first season of the United States’ version of “MasterChef” in 2010, will serve as consulting pastry chef.

“We’ll focus on getting dinner streamlined and then maybe we’ll readdress lunch at some point,” Gates said. “Obviously, there’s a lot of little things that you have to go through to get up and running, so, I’m just ready to get those out of the way and get to what I enjoy about it, which is the actual cooking and then the actual interaction with guests.”

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