St. Mary OKs Atchafalaya Construction
July 15, 2008
Rickie J. Harris
July 17, 2008
Baton Rouge-based Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers will open restaurants in East Houma and Thibodaux this fall.
The East Houma restaurant will open in mid-September at 945 Grand Caillou Road, the former What-A-Burger location.
“Recently, we’ve been opening some restaurants as renovations like that one,” said Juan Simoneaux, a Raising Cane’s marketing representative. “It’s just a location that worked for us as far as demographics, traffic flow and accessibility to a different customer base than the other one.”
This will be the second Raising Cane’s in Houma. The first opened in 2003 on Martin Luther King Boulevard.
“Houma was one of the first locations we grew into outside of the Baton Rouge area,” Simoneaux said. “[The Houma] store has done just so phenomenally well for us. The city is growing as well, and we wanted to be a part of that continued growth in the community.”
Meanwhile, Thibodaux residents have been asking for a Raising Cane’s for years, he said.
The city’s first Raising Cane’s will open either in late October or early November at 301 N. Canal Blvd. That is about one mile northwest of the Nicholls State campus.
“A lot of our growth has been adjacent to universities,” Simoneaux said. “For similar reasons, Nicholls is a good fit for us. We wanted to find the right location within the community that could serve both the university population and the entire Thibodaux community.”
The restaurant, which replaces the demolished La Casa Del Sol, will have a different layout. At about 3,500 square feet, it will be slightly bigger than the Houma restaurants.
Raising Cane’s, which has 2,500 employees, hires about 35 to 40 crewmembers and five managers for each location. Applications are currently being accepted.
Further expansion in the Tri-parishes or surrounding areas is not planned.
However, the company will continue to develop its brand in other markets.
“Todd Graves, our founder and CEO, his vision is to have restaurants all over the world,” Simoneaux said.
There also are no plans to broaden the menu either. Raising Cane’s sticks to a simple “one-love” concept.
“The basis of ‘one love’ is focusing on one thing and doing it better than everybody else,” he said. “By just concentrating on chicken fingers, it allows us to prepare casual dining restaurant orders at a fast-food restaurant pace.”
Raising Cane’s owns all of its Louisiana restaurants and most of the ones throughout the country. If the general mangers at the new stores do exceptionally well, they may have the chance to set up their own franchise, according to Simoneaux.
“We have what we term ‘pillar franchise locations,'” Simoneaux said. “Todd works with the best of the best general managers to help get their efforts off the ground so that they own it outright as a true franchise.”
Another growth indicator, company owner Graves and company mascot Raising Cane II are the focus of the company’s first national commercial, which will begin airing next month.
The vacant What-A-Burger on Grand Caillou Road is getting new life. It will be the home of Houma’s second Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers. * Photo by KEYON JEFF
