The Dick’s Drive-In under construction on Kent’s West Hill could be open by late November.
“We’re targeting sometime in mid-to-late November, but we have not set a date yet,” said Jasmine Donovan, Dick’s executive vice president and CEO, in a Sept. 27 email.
At a groundbreaking ceremony in April, a company official had indicated a potential October opening. Crews are building the restaurant at 24220 Pacific Highway South near the Midway Shopping Center, just south of the Lowe’s store on the east side of the road.
“Construction is always tricky and our team has done a great job staying on schedule as much as humanly possible,” Donovan said. “We do not consider the project delayed. It is within our projected opening time frame of fall 2018.”
The restaurant will employ about 50 people. It is the seventh Dick’s Drive-In, but the first one south of Seattle. The expansion is the first for the company since the Edmonds location opened in October 2011. Dick’s has five Seattle locations, including the original site that opened in 1954 in the Wallingford neighborhood, just west of the University of Washington.
The new location is easily accessible, sitting just west of Interstate 5 and along a business-filled highway with Highline College and Mount Rainier High School nearby in Des Moines. It’s also 5 miles south of Sea-Tac Airport, and a half-mile south of the Kent-Des Moines Road (aka State Route 516) intersection.
Dick’s let its fans decide where to place the company’s newest restaurant. The new site selection process included an online customer poll that attracted more than 170,000 votes, 100,000 of which came in the first 24 hours. On March 27, 2017, the company announced on Facebook Live that the south region had won with 60 percent of the vote. Dick’s officials later selected the Kent site.
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