Little Havana’s hottest club was shut down by the city last year. It’s reopening soon.
Cue the salsa. The lights are about to go back on at Little Havana’s Ball & Chain.
The popular nightclub and restaurant, which has been closed for nearly a year as it jousted with the city of Miami over code violations, is set to reopen within a month, its owners told the Miami Herald.
“We satisfied all the requirements the city has made of us,” Ball & Chain co-owner Bill Fuller said. “And there were a lot of hoops and hurdles.”
The city ordered Ball & Chain closed Oct. 22, 2020, hours after city commissioner Joe Carollo co-sponsored legislation that made it easier to revoke a business’ certificate of use. The city told the Herald that an audit showed the club had more than 40 deficiencies after a summer renovation. They ranged from the minute, a women’s bathroom stall door swinging the wrong way, to a deficient fire-suppression sprinkler system.
But on Tuesday the club was granted a new temporary certificate of use and business license to allow it to immediately reopen, at least on the inside. The outside “pineapple stage” is still awaiting final approvals but Fuller says he expects to have those in hand by the time the club reopens.
Meanwhile, Ball & Chain will have to rehire its entire staff and train them before reopening for crowds. Many have moved on to other professions or left the city, an ongoing problem for Miami’s restaurant and hospitality industry.
“We want to make sure that we wow them,” Fuller said. “We want to bring it back in the way people expect it to be. We will be back with the best of what we had: the dancing, the music, the flavors — the entire experience.”
Beneath that bureaucracy, Miami politics were at play.
Ball & Chain’s ownership has been locked into litigation with the city since October 2018, when Fuller sued Carollo and city officials for $2.5 million. Fuller claims his First Amendment rights were violated when Carollo pushed code enforcement to come down hard on businesses Fuller co-owns. That case is pending in federal court. In late September, Ball & Chain’s parent company filed a separate $28 million lawsuit against the city. Mad Room LLC accused the city of unfair treatment and harassment through unnecessary code inspections to passing of laws that only target certain Calle Ocho businesses. The company claims city officials moved the goal posts during permitting processes and relied on incorrect interpretations of Miami’s code to harass and shut down businesses, including Ball & Chain and Taquerias el Mexicano.
“After a year-long closure brought on by the City of Miami’s unlawful conduct aimed at destroying our landmark establishment, Mad Room Hospitality is pleased to announce that it expects to re-open Ball & Chain in the very near future. We look forward to full vindication in our lawsuit against the City, to prove and permanently remedy its egregious and intentional violations on our constitutionally protected rights,” the company wrote the Herald in a statement.
Ball & Chain even worked with Marcus Lemonis, the Miami-raised businessman and host of CNBC’s reality show “The Profit,” to work as an intermediary, and he remains a “close ally and strategic partner.”
Little Havana was hit especially hard during the pandemic, as tourism is the lifeblood of business on Ball & Chain’s stretch of Calle Ocho. The restaurant across the street, El Exquisito, a fixture since 1974, closed and won’t reopen. And next-door Azucar ice cream shop had to open an outlet in Kendall when visitors to Little Havana thinned.
“Calle Ocho has missed something great with Ball & Chain being closed,” Fuller said. “This is a restoration of the Calle Ocho we always knew.”
This story was originally published October 19, 2021 at 3:40 PM.
