Eat'n Park starting from the ground up after decades on Banksville Road

By Teresa F. Lindeman / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

By the end of the year, the 25,000 Pittsburghers who drive by the Eatn Park restaurant on Banksville Road each day will be able to describe that spot as the place where the Eatn Park used to be.

The new place wont be far away just down the parking lot from the site that has been cooking up breakfasts, burgers and fish dinners for decades but management promises the place will represent a generational leap.

The new restaurant will have the same staff and the same menu but it will be built with construction techniques, including skylights to let the kitchen staff enjoy natural light, that aim for the LEED Silver certification meant to honor attention to reducing the impact on the environment.

Its time that our building matches the team members and our food, said Jeff Broadhurst, president and CEO of Eatn Park Hospitality Group, a Homestead company that operates more than 70 restaurants and also runs food operations for hospitals, universities and other businesses that two years ago began pulling in more revenues than the restaurants. Last year company revenues hit $403 million, up from $355 million the previous year.

This Thursday, Mr. Broadhurst and his brothers Brooks Broadhurst, senior vice president of food and beverage, and Mark Broadhurst, vice president of corporate dining and retail development will bring the shovels to the Banksville site to hold a ceremonial groundbreaking on the new restaurant that will replace one that went up in the late 1960s.

The new Banksville restaurant is a long time coming and a significant investment. It took awhile to work out the deal that adds approximately one acre to the existing 1.4-acre site a neighboring auto body shop was torn down and theres an adjacent cliff that pens in development.

The project is costing well over $2 million, said Jeff Broadhurst, and it isn't even the only overhaul planned this year. Eatn Park plans five remodels (Greensburg and Latrobe locations are on the to-do list), in addition to tearing down the Banksville restaurant and another on Library Road to replace with new structures.

Since 2008, the company has remodeled 27 of its Eatn Park restaurants and added 41 pick-up windows.

In advance of Thursdays groundbreaking, Mark and Brooks sat down at Eatn Park headquarters with Jeff tapped in via conference call from Maryland to talk about the state of the company.

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Eat'n Park starting from the ground up after decades on Banksville Road