Restaurants at entertainment hubs like Texas Live! were packed, and barbecue restaurants like Terry Black’s Barbecue and Hurtado Barbecue served long lines of international visitors throughout the tournament.<\/p>\n
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Just a short distance away, however, some small businesses near Dallas Stadium experienced the opposite.<\/p>\n
At Zack’s Bistro off of I-30 along Copeland Road, owner Zack Sekouri and his daughter, Shereen Sekouri, expected the World Cup to bring their strongest month of sales.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Instead, the family says business dropped by about 70%.<\/p>\n
“This is everything. This is my dad’s dream,” Shereen Sekouri said.<\/p>\n
While Zack Sekouri traveled to Morocco to visit family, Shereen remained in Arlington to run the restaurant. As business slowed, she took on a second job this month to help make ends meet.<\/p>\n
“It’s been pretty bad, really,” Zack Sekouri said.<\/p>\n
Despite initially welcoming the tournament, he said the outcome caught him by surprise.<\/p>\n
“Honestly, for me it was a big surprise. It’s the opposite of what you thought would happen,” he said. “I bought extra food, hired extra people. I was so excited because I’m walking distance to the stadium, but it’s the opposite.”<\/p>\n
The family says the problem was not a lack of visitors. Instead, they believe game day traffic, road closures and limited parking discouraged their regular customers from visiting.<\/p>\n
Fans parked in spaces typically used by restaurant customers, while congestion around the stadium made reaching nearby businesses difficult.<\/p>\n
“We didn’t lose our customers. We lost access to them,” Shereen Sekouri said.<\/p>\n
She said business came to what felt like a complete halt during tournament days.<\/p>\n
“It all stopped. Almost like a dead complete stop. It became a ghost town,” she said.<\/p>\n
The owner of the neighboring Brother’s Pizza said the restaurant experienced similar challenges during the tournament, with a weekly sales decline of nearly $3,000.<\/p>\n
Tuesday’s final match between Spain and France in Arlington brought an end to weeks of crowds that generated millions in tourism spending across the city of Arlington.<\/p>\n
For Zack’s Bistro, the family hopes that also means the return of its regular customers.<\/p>\n
“I’m positive we’re going to be full again,” Shereen Sekouri said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While packed venues and tourism fueled record business across Arlington, some small restaurants near Dallas Stadium became ghost…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":373775,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[150,152,151],"class_list":["post-373774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arlington","tag-arlington","tag-arlington-headlines","tag-arlington-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}