Chick-Fil-A to close temporarily for remodeling – Rocky Mount Telegram

A popular local fast-food restaurant soonwill temporarily shut down as part of a major remodeling project done by the company.

The Chick-Fil-A at 1332 Jeffreys Road in Cobb Corners will be closed for a month. Franchise owner Bob Lehnes said the restaurant will close after Aug. 12 and re-open sometime in mid-September.

Lehnes said the company will be investing about $1 million in the renovation of the local restauarant. Lehnes, who moved Chick-Fil-A to its current location in 2001, said this is usually around the time when the company remodels its restaurants.

Were approaching right at 16 years, Lehnes said.Typically, when a store is about 15 years old, Chick-Fil-A looks at remodeling it. For the most part, theyre going to gut the store.

The upgrades to Chick-Fil-A will involve plans to add about 20 feet or more to the back of the building to expand and upgrade the kitchen area.

The kitchen will be truly designed to handle the volume of business that were doing, he said. When we re-open, we will have roughly 30 percent more capacity to cook. We will also have two grills instead of one. If one goes down for maintenance reasons, we will still have a backup and not be losing product.

The Chick-Fil-A will have double drive-thru lines to help accelerate service for customers.

We will have two ordering points and two lanes approaching the ordering points, which we feel will help expedite and speed up the drive-thru a little more, Lehnes said.

Lehnes added the revamped look will have the front counter being a little further out, but the restaurant will maintain five registers on the counter plus a special dedicated register for pick-up and catering orders.The condiment bar at the front of the restaurant will be replaced by smaller condiment bars that will be located in both the front and back part of the dining area, Lehnes said.

A big bench table will be added in the dining room, which can accomodate up to eight to 10 people, Lehnes added.

Its always nice when they put this in other stores, Lehnes said. That usually seemed to be well-received by your larger families, youth groups or large groups of teenagers that come in and want to sit together.

The renovations will cause some seating impact in the dining room.

That push-out of the front counter will have us end up losing about 10 seats in the whole scheme of it all, which is probably the only negative, Lehnes said.But were one of the larger Chick-Fil-As as far as seating capacity. We usually dont have as many challenges with inside seating as some other restaurants.

The remodeling will impact 90 to 100 Chick-Fil-A employees.Lehnes said the plan is to have some employees placed at nearby Chick-Fil-A restaurants in Wilson and Roanoke Rapids and possibly at Greenville. Some full-time employees, who have known about the remodeling coming for the past two years, will take paid vaction time, Lehnes said.

Lehnesalso will be taking staff to a few Chick-Fil-A restaurants in the region, which have both the new kitchen design and multi-lane drive-thrus for them to observe the operations. There are also plans to add additional staff.

Were going to be hiring during that four-week down period, Lehnes said.We always expect a good bump up in sales after we re-open. We feel this is going to set us up for future success and growth of the business.

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Chick-Fil-A to close temporarily for remodeling - Rocky Mount Telegram