New brunch spot Sassy’s to open in former Butterbean Market space in Manchester

The space has sat vacant since 2020. (Courtesy Mindie Ballard)

A long-vacant café space in Manchester has been snagged by a breakfast-focused restaurateur. 

Jilan Hall-Johnson plans to open Sassy’s, a brunch spot, in the former Butterbean Market & Café storefront at 1200-1206 Hull St. 

Sassy’s will be a spinoff of The Sassy Biscuit, a restaurant Hall-Johnson owns and operates in Billings, Montana. 

A North Carolina native, Hall-Johnson first found her way west due to her former spouse’s military career. After a stint in San Diego, she ended up in Montana and opened The Sassy Biscuit in 2018. 

Jilan Hall-Johnson (Courtesy The Sassy Biscuit)

Hall-Johnson said she built The Sassy Biscuit’s menu around her own biscuit dough recipe, using variations of it to make other breakfast staples like pancakes and waffles. She said she got the idea after noticing that successful restaurants in San Diego tended to focus on one or two specific items. 

“That’s why I built my concept around the biscuit, and turning it into different products,” Hall-Johnson said. 

She said The Sassy Biscuit makes its hot sauces, gravy, sausage, seasoning blends and more in-house, in an effort to make it the type of restaurant that could succeed in smaller towns that don’t have a big food scene. 

“I wanted to make sure that it was something that someone with an elevated palate could come in and really enjoy,” she said. “(But) I had to make sure, as well, that it could be for the average person who was just looking to eat breakfast. … That’s the ‘elevated but approachable’ take we take.”

The plan all along was to try to scale the business, and Hall-Johnson added a Dover, New Hampshire, location in 2019, before selling that one in 2023. 

After moving to Richmond a couple years ago, she felt like the city was a step up from Billings and Dover, and that an up-and-coming area like Manchester was a good fit for her concept.

Sassy’s will operate with counter service. (Mindie Ballard)

The Hull Street spot will have a slightly different name, Sassy’s, in part because Hall-Johnson said she’s considering expanding the concept to stay open into the evening and serve a larger menu. 

Hall-Johnson said she’s aiming to open Sassy’s sometime in July, and that she’ll continue to own the Billings location.

She’s working on some renovations to the Manchester space that’ll include adding a hood, gas lines and prep area. Emerge Construction Group is the general contractor and Fultz & Singh Architects is the designer for the project. 

The storefront has sat largely dormant since 2020, when Butterbean went dark as part of the legal troubles of its owner, embattled local businessman Michael Hild. 

The roughly 2,300-square-foot space became available last fall after Hild’s lender, Virginia Credit Union, won a court order to take control of the property, as well as Hild’s nearby Dogtown Brewing Co. and Hot Diggity Donuts spaces. The properties, which Hild and wife Laura bought and redeveloped in the late 2010s, were pulled into the legal collapse of Hild’s reverse mortgage company, Live Well Financial, a process that’s ongoing both in federal bankruptcy court and criminal court. 

One South Commercial’s Chris Corrada, who’s marketing the spaces with colleague Ann Schweitzer Riley, said they’re currently negotiating a lease for the Hot Diggity Donuts space at 1213 Hull St., and that there have been multiple parties interested in the Dogtown Brewing space at 1209 Hull St.

Once all the buildings have been stabilized, Corrada said they’ll be sold off through an auction, the proceeds of which would go toward paying Virginia Credit Union at least part of what it’s owed from the Hilds.