Olive Garden opening restaurant near Exit 7

Olive Garden will join a spate of other new national chain restaurants scheduled to open near Interstate 81’s Exit 7.

Representatives of Darden Restaurants, an Orlando, Fla.-based commercial firm billing itself as the world’s largest restaurant company, signed an agreement Tuesday to build and operate a 7,500-square-foot Olive Garden on a vacant 2.1-acre site near the Walmart Supercenter. It will join Red Lobster as the firm’s second business in the city and its third Tri-Cities Olive Garden location.

In the past year, Cheddar’s Casual Café, Chik-fil-A and Mellow Mushroom also announced plans to build in an area already rife with national chain eateries. Chik-fil-A is scheduled to open next week and work on the other two is now under way.

“We’ve been working on this for a year-and-a-half,” said Doug Weberling, chairman of the city’s Economic Development Committee, of the Olive Garden deal. “For at least the last three years, patients have been asking me when are we getting an Olive Garden. It’s been difficult, knowing we were this close, not to be able to tell them. I’m very excited.”

Darden owns and operates more than 1,900 restaurants in 49 states – including 750 Olive Garden locations - employs about 180,000 people and reported fiscal 2011 sales of $7.5 billion.

The new restaurant will be built on the former site of a Prime Sirloin Buffet restaurant, between Golden Corral and Fazoli’s. It is expected to open in mid-2012, according to Allea Newbold of True Partners Consulting.

“It will employ 80 full-time equivalents, so it will probably be up to 120 people, but that varies by location depending on their schedules,” Newbold said. “Darden hasn’t closed on the property. They don’t own it yet, so the first step will be to acquire the property.”

Mayor Ed Harlow said city leaders are pleased to continue building the city’s tax base with another destination-style restaurant.

The firm’s decision coincided with Tuesday’s unanimous votes by the city’s Economic Development Committee and City Council to approve a $350,000 incentive package. The money will be performance-based and only paid after the restaurant is open and generating tax revenues, said Andrew Trivette, the city’s director of economic and community development.

The incentives were a key factor in the firm’s decision, Newbold said.

“Before construction started, they [Darden] factored those incentives into their numbers,” Newbold said. “With a business, the incentives help increase the return on investment and the sites with the highest return get the first priority.”

Darden expects to invest about $4 million on the project and typically spends more per square foot than other retailers to make sites more energy efficient, she said. The company has been looking at Bristol, Va., since opening its Red Lobster on Linden Drive.

“The Red Lobster has been doing well and when one concept does well, they [Darden] begin looking at expanding to the other concept – the Olive Garden,” Newbold said. “When they look at an area, they evaluate it for a number of years.”

In addition to acquiring the site, the new restaurant must receive approval from the city’s planning process and those permits are already pending.

Work will likely begin sometime later this year and will take about six months to build and open, said Brett Maschak of Darden Restaurants.

Site access, visibility, size, and traffic count also factored into the decision, Maschak said.

dmcgee@bristolnews.com
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