New Restaurant Coming to Lafayette

By Mark Darnell

 It won’t be long until most people in and around Lafayette will be able to “have it their own way.” It appears that there will be a Burger King coming to our town.

 

Recently a corporation called Carrols Restaurant Group, Inc. applied for and was granted utility and building licenses by the City of Lafayette. It appears that construction will be on an out parcel in the old Wal-Mart shopping center, near the present Krystal.

Carrols Corporation is headquartered in Syracuse, NY and owns and operates over 800 restaurants under the Burger King brand. They operate in 17 different states in the Eastern US and employ over 21,000 people.

According to the company website they were founded in 1960 when Herbert N Slotnick was granted the exclusive license rights for New York State for their Carrols Drive-In Restaurants. In 1975 that company entered into an agreement with the corporate division of Burger King to convert a number of their fast food Drive-Ins.

Today the company owns approximately 27 stores in Tennessee, with the largest concentration around the Nashville area. They posted sales of over $943M in 2016 and are publicly traded on the Nasdaq under the symbol TAST. They are the largest BK franchisee in the world and the Burger King Corporation also owns 21% equity interest in Carrols.

Bob Storie, Carrols construction manager for the Lafayette project, did confirm the project in a phone interview. He did make a rough preliminary estimate of breaking ground sometime in July of this year and said that the goal was to have the store ready to open in 70 days.

Information about employment and other opportunities weren’t available from the corporate office of Carrols Corporation at press time.