A locally owned restaurant in Morehead is being torn down in favor of rebuilding.
Earlier this summer, there was a fire at Morehead’s La Finca Mexican restaurant on Main Street. Officials said the blaze likely started in mulch outside the building, engulfing a tree and part of the structure. Nobody was injured in the fire, but the building was damaged, and owners decided to demolish the structure entirely.
Rodney Fouch is Morehead’s City Planner and Building Inspector. He said in the case of extreme structural damage, careful inspection is done to decide if the building can remain standing.
“If the question is, ‘Can I repair it and not tear it down?’, then it would have typically required an engineer analysis to make sure that there was not too much structural damage so that it’s still a safe structure,” said Fouch. “In this case, it didn’t come to that because the owner made the decision to tear it down themselves.”
Fouch said the owners currently plan to construct a new building and open La Finca back up for business.
“They’d already been talking about whether to remodel or demolish and rebuild, and I think that seemed to be the precipice for it. And they just decided to demo the whole thing,” said Fouch.
The eatery’s eventual reopening would put it amongst other local restaurants coming to downtown Morehead, including Fat Patty’s and Tres Hermanos Nunez.