After four years, the Arsaga’s Mill District location in south Fayetteville is shutting its doors. Last week, the restaurant hosted a reception featuring artwork from co-owner Cindy Arsaga to commemorate the closing. Reporter Daniel Caruth brings us this report.
Bri: But yeah, these are the silos. There's three or there's four, and they're just like. And then apparently that also, I mean,
Caruth: Just behind the Arsaga’s Mill District location on South School Avenue in Fayetteville. Bree, a barista at Arsaga’s, points to several metal rings coming through the concrete patio. This particular location has seen a lot of different variations over the years, including, at one point, its namesake, a mill. And Bri says she learned about this history through one of her customers.
Bri: Who went to school here in, like, the ’60s. Like, this really old dude. Like, I mean, I could not believe he was here, but he was like, “This used to be a feed mill.” And I was like, “What?”
Caruth: And just like this spot, the Arsaga’s franchise has seen its own series of moving and shifting in the past three decades. Cary and Cindy Arsaga, the husband-and-wife owners, started their first café on Block Street in Fayetteville in 1992 and have hopped around the city ever since, changing and growing with Fayetteville itself.
Cary Arsaga: I never thought I would be in the restaurant business. I gotta admit, I really did like it, but it's hard. It's trying. And so, we're going back to what brung us here—coffee.
Caruth: That's Cary Arsaga. He says The Mill took over as the main dining location and a third space for people to gather from their previous full-service restaurant, The Depot, off of West Avenue. He says closing this spot feels like the end of an era.
Cary Arsaga: It served the purpose of bringing people together in a good space, and we tried a lot of different things here. You know, we used to be open till 9 o’clock at night. We had supper, lunch, you know, breakfast.
And we finally narrowed it down to just doing brunch four days a week. But it was time to turn it over to somebody else that had more money than me, that could pay the mortgage and let them take over. So I’ll miss it, and I’m ready to move on to the next stage of my life, which we’ll see what that’s going to be.
Caruth: Tonight, at the restaurant, Cindy Arsaga is hosting a retrospective art exhibition, something that The Mill has done for other local artists since it opened. The exhibition features a collection of her artwork scattered across the walls and spanning 20 years.
Cindy Arsaga: All but one belongs—is already owned by somebody. And they’re all locally owned. So when I decided to do this, I just thought, I’ll just see who’s got what and if they’ll lend it to me for a month and a half or whatever.
Caruth: Cindy says having this be the final exhibition for the restaurant is a fitting send-off.
Cindy Arsaga: I mean, we loved making spaces and finding spaces that, you know, needed to be saved or not torn down and were usable, that you could do something with. So it was fun to look at places like The Depot, which we loved more than any place we ever had, and realize that if somebody didn’t do something with it, it was probably going to be a teardown. And I think that was the thing that really cinched it for us there. And that was a big ask because we had to have a restaurant, and we hadn’t done that in the past. We just had coffeehouses.
Caruth: Dey Self, who curated tonight’s exhibition, is also a former restaurant employee at a previous location. She says part of Arsaga’s appeal is how intertwined the business is with the city of Fayetteville.
Self: It just has a, you know, our community feeling. It is—you only find them here in Fayetteville. You know, I started working at Arsaga’s bakery before it was Little Bread Company, washing dishes back in the ’90s. I feel like so many kids that have filtered through Fayetteville worked at Arsaga’s—washed dishes, worked as a barista. It’s kind of become a real part of our community. And it’s great that there’s still so many locations of theirs open. It’s not ending, right? We’re just losing this space, which is kind of a bummer.
Caruth: Robert Bishop is another former Arsaga’s employee. He’s helped run a pop-up dinner series called Rabbit Hole out of the Mill District since 2023 and is here prepping for their final service tomorrow night. With The Mill closing, they haven’t yet found another spot to host the series. He says starting this project was something that Cary and Cindy encouraged them to pursue.
Bishop: And, well, that’s the thing is, they really foster creativity in their employees. If you have an aptitude to do something, they’ll notice it and they’ll say, “Well, why don’t you try this?” or “Why don’t you do this?” There was a period where I was kind of getting burned out at the law library, and I still wanted my hours, and they were like, “Why don’t you go work at the roastery?”
So, I started working in the roastery, and I got really into how they were roasting their beans and delivering them and wholesaling. And, you know, now that I’ve gotten really into cooking my own food, the same thing—they were like, “Well, you could use our kitchen and experiment in there and kind of learn the ropes in there.” And that’s just what we did.
Caruth: And barista Bree, who has worked with Arsaga’s for a decade, says preserving that community has made this location unique. But she says the food itself has also been just as important.
Bri: Well, if you’ve lived here for a long time, if you’re from here, everybody knows what the Brzezinski is, and people are torn up about it being gone. Turkish eggs, the Townie. Food-wise, I mean, we served so many allergies. That’s a big dietary restriction in allergies. And if you go toe to toe with other breakfast places, they’re not doing it like us. So that will definitely be a void that someone will have to fill.
Caruth: And filling that void, at least physically, will be the second location for Little Rock–based Dempsey’s Bakery, which will take over the building sometime in early 2026. And Arsaga’s still has four cafés in Fayetteville, and Cary says he still has plans to open a fifth location.
Cary Arsaga: I’m pretty sure we’re going to be opening up a coffee shop on Mount Sequoyah. We haven’t signed the lease yet, but that’s just a matter of a few weeks away, I think, and I’m looking forward to being up there. It won’t replace The Mill in the sense that it’s not going to be a restaurant, but I think it can replace The Mill in the sense of it being a gathering place for people having events, fundraisers, etc. And being on Mount Sequoyah is really special. It’s really nice up there, and it has a certain old-Fayetteville feel that I’m looking forward to being a part of.
The Arsaga’s Mill District will close officially this weekend with its final service on Sunday, Oct. 19.
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