17-Jan-11 – Less than a year after filling a long-vacant space at Marina City with a Subway restaurant, the original Peoria-based franchisee has sold it to a Chicago company.

Fazal Development Network, a small firm with a big network of Chicago Subways, bought the Marina City location on January 12.

Murad Fazal, president of the company headquartered on South State Street, says it was not financially worthwhile for William Torchia, president and CEO of Fifth Day Restaurants, to stay with the location because he did not have other local outlets.

Torchia has built more than 50 Subway restaurants over the past 20 years, but this was his first in Chicago.

“He had several stores in the Peoria market and he wanted to come and expand into the Chicago market,” explains Fazal. “His plan was to grow to five, seven stores immediately but he’s been in the Chicago market with only one store and has not really been able to expand.”

William Torchia (center), president and CEO of Fifth Day Restaurants, LLC, the original franchisee of the Subway restaurant at Marina City. (At left, Val Krynski, the general contractor when the store was built in 2010, and at right, Mike Kaminski, the project manager.)

Fazal’s company owns and operates 24 Subways in the Chicago area. According to a 2003 Chicago Tribune article, Fazal and three partners, including his brother and uncle, opened their first Subway in 1987 near the Board of Trade Building.

The company wasted no time making changes to the Marina City store. By the weekend, new menu items were added and personnel changes made. Fazal says he added additional staff “to get the line moving faster so people are not having to wait.”

“The first thing we wanted to do was to clean up the store,” he said on Monday. “And number two, we wanted to make sure that we are offering all the products that all the Subways are required to offer at all times. Number three, we wanted to change the employees a little bit, improve the service, improve the quality of the products.”

While emphasizing the previous owner did not have bad products, Fazal says his crew will bake the bread and cookies more often, and cut new vegetables twice a day.

The store opened on May 24, 2010. The space had not been occupied since 1988, when it was a Dollar Rent-A-Car location that paid $2,216 per month in rent.

Initially open 24 hours a day, the Subway shop cut back its late night hours in September.