Burger King shooting for Labor Day opening

The completion of Apalachicola’s Burger King is now scheduled for around Labor Day. 

“We are now targeting end of August for store completion and opening,” said James Bennett, one of the principals of PDI of Florida, LLC, which owns the 1.2 acres at 421 U.S. 98 where the fast food restaurant sits.

He said he was on-site the last week of June, “pushing the general contractor to get this one wrapped up.”

The Apalachicola Burger King is one of the last of PDI’s franchisees in the Panhandle to reopen after Hurricane Michael in 2018.

Bennett said PDI is looking carefully at attracting a pool of available workers for the Burger King. “That is a major concern in the area but we hope to have that resolved come end of August.” he said.

He said that as the August opening date nears, Consolidated Burger Holdings LLC. a large franchisee that owns and operates the majority of Burger Kings in the Panhandle, will have an air-conditioned trailer on site where they will take job applications.

PDI is spending a little more than $157,000 on the remodeling by Denny Sanders Construction, out of Lynn Haven, based on a design drawn up by Fusion Architects, out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

The footprint of the building itself will shrink from 5,061 to 4,127 square feet, in large part due to the permanent removal of the playground area that used to front U.S. 98.

The new look, both inside and outside, is in keeping with Burger King’s newest Garden Grill prototype, which includes squaring off the roof line, adding new parapets and new interior and exterior imaging, Bennett said.

The drive-through will move more smoothly and quicker than it used to, since the developers have torn out the old equipment, and will replace it with a new, double drive-through.

Stormwater will be better handled with an upgraded stormwater retention pond on the east side of the property. Ingress and egress from the property will continue as it had, and they’re be 32 parking spaces, two of them dedicated for the handcapped, on the nearly 30,000 square feet of asphalt that surrounds the building.

They’ll be ramp access for wheelchairs on both the east and west sides of the building. In all the total impervious surface will be about 35,600 square feet, roughly two-thirds of the total land acres.