The White Horse Inn is prepped and ready. The Champaign health department, not so much.

White Horse had intentions of reopening at its new location at 510 E. John St., the former location of the bar Fire Station, on Aug. 1, but will have to wait at least two weeks for the health department to review the location.

“We put in our paperwork with the health department, but apparently there’s a queue that you have to wait for,” part-owner Daina Mattis said. “We thought we’d be able to get everything done. We’re quite ready — just waiting on them.”

Mattis said she anticipates the bar will open before the beginning of the fall semester, but that she would prefer there be a couple of weeks to iron out kinks and prepare the staff.

The White Horse had been located at 112 E. Green St., since 1973, but briefly closed under previous ownership in November 2007. Mattis and her husband, Aidas, part-owner of the bar and a medical and doctoral student at the University, joined in 2008 and reopened the bar.

White Horse closed its kitchen within months of reopening because of its inconvenient location and shut down completely again in February 2010 with intentions of finding a new location.

“The food was struggling because we were so far away, so we decided to close down the kitchen and open the bar from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. The model was working for us, actually.”

White Horse had its heart set on the central location of 510 E. John St., but the ownership of Fire Station secured the spot mere weeks ahead of them.

After looking at a few more locations, including one near Busey Bank, ownership decided to return to its old location in January 2011 before it could lose its liquor license. Its kitchen doors remained shut.

“It was definitely frustrating, but we left the building in great shape so we basically just put those old shoes back on,” Mattis said.

Fire Station closed after two years of questionable management. The establishment was legally a restaurant but often promoted itself more like a bar.

“They just called one day and said we’re not opening,” said Madeleine Ogrinc, senior in material sciences and engineering and a former Fire Station employee. “Bad management. … We were one bar that got badly in trouble.”

At the end of the year, Mattis said, an establishment needs to present certain business percentages based on its licenses. As a restaurant, Fire Station needed at least 60 percent of its profits to come from food and only a maximum of 40 percent of its business could come from alcohol sales. Mattis said she doesn’t anticipate similar problems at White Horse.

While White Horse isn’t interested in focusing as much of its attention on its food menu, it is hoping to attract customers with a unique delicacy: White Horse will import 12 different kinds of German sausages from Continental Gourmet Sausages, located in Glendale, Calif.

“It’s just something different that you can’t really get in Champaign,” Mattis said. “You can get burgers everywhere. These sausages are different than anything else.”

Mattis said one of the most appealing aspects of moving White Horse to its location was that the bar is how University students will associate the bar with other bars in the “hub of everything.”

“‘Townies,’ as they call themselves, thought that our bar was a Campustown bar, and the Campustown people thought we were a Townie bar, so we were alienating both,” Mattis said. “In the heyday, before downtown Champaign was built up, White Horse was the place to go. But once downtown got built up, people started going downtown. We got stuck in no-man’s land.”

Still, establishing a demographic of customers doesn’t happen overnight. Many bars, such as KAM’S, Joe’s and Red Lion, have a strong Greek presence, while the bars Murhpy’s and Legends cater to a different crowd.

“What I’ve noticed is that even in places like Clybourne’s and Firehaus, during the day they get a bunch of graduate students and construction workers and so forth,” Mattis said. “And we’re happy to hit that market. … You want to reach out to everybody and have something to appeal to everybody.”