LEWISTON – Marco’s Restaurant will reopen somewhere else.

The owners of the former downtown eatery, which burned in July, have sold their Lisbon Street property to a local landlord, Richard Breton of Double Eagle Properties.

The Sun Journal could not determine Monday what will happen to the downtown site. Meanwhile, Marco’s partners Steve Taylor and Duane Arnold have found a property outside the downtown to rebuild, though they won’t say where it is.

“We’re 100 percent sure that we’re going to continue the business,” Arnold said Monday. However, they couldn’t afford to rebuild at their original location.

“We wanted to be able to renovate and open up for the Christmas season,” said Arnold. “That’s when we did so much business.”

A renovation would have cost $1.3 million, he said. It would have taken $80,000 just to tear it down. Instead, Arnold and Taylor sold their parcel for “almost nothing.”

City officials said they don’t know what’s planned for the downtown property. The Sun Journal was unable to reach Breton on Monday.

At the same time he bought the Marco’s site, Breton also purchased the former Kora Temple building next to Marco’s, said Lincoln Jeffers, Lewiston’s deputy director of economic and community development.

City assessing records show that Double Eagle Properties owns several rental homes around Lewiston, including places on Maple, Shawmut, Drew, Summer and Dumont streets.

“I don’t know what Breton plans to do,” Jeffers said.

Taylor and Arnold are also deciding.

The partners looked at several sites around the downtown, but something was always missing, Arnold said.

Aligning the parking and the space and the cost proved too tough, he said. They have since decided on a Lewiston site outside the downtown, but they have yet to complete the deal.

If everything goes well, a new Marco’s could open this spring, Arnold said.

“We miss working,” he said.

The restaurant opened in 1978. Arnold began working at Marco’s in 1986, when he was 15 years old. Taylor came along seven years later, hired as a cook.

The partners bought the restaurant in April 2000 from Marco Giancotti. By the following January, business was going so well that Arnold and Taylor bought the building in an owner-financed deal. As much as they could, they reinvested earnings back into the business.

“We were trying to renovate in small ways,” Taylor said shortly after the fire. They had bought new carpeting and furniture. There were behind-the-scenes investments in equipment. The partners were also in the process of refinancing the property in hopes of getting a lower interest rate.

Then, the fire happened.

Their aim now is to build a new building, creating a place about the same size as the old restaurant with the same food.

After all, it worked before.

“We definitely want to reopen as soon as possible,” Arnold said.