A Trio of Chick-fil-As Are Coming to New Orleans, but Residents Are Very Much Loyal to Popeyes

Late last week, New Orleans city council member Kristin Palmer announced that the council approved plans for a location of Chick-fil-A in Algiers on New Orleans’s West Bank, celebrating the city’s first stand-alone location of the Atlanta-based fast food chain. Now, two more Chick-fil-A’s are in the works for New Orleans, raising eyebrows for those wary of the chain’s history of supporting anti-LGBTQ causes or, for some, of the notorious local developer behind one of the proposed locations, Sidney Torres.

Chick-fil-A and Torres’s plans were outlined in a letter sent to the Mid-City Neighborhood Organization this week, seeking approval for a Chick-fil-A on the corner of Tulane Avenue and South Carrollton Avenue in Mid-City. The address at 4068 Tulane Avenue is currently home to Torres’s NOLA Chick drive-thru restaurant, which he quietly opened a few months back in early 2021 (it was previously a Burger King, which closed in Summer 2020). The plans propose demolishing the existing building and building a new 2,600-square-foot restaurant set further back from the street. It would be drive-thru-only, with plans for two drive-thru lanes and patio seating for 16 people, but no inside dining. “This is a newer model for Chick-fil-A with exclusive service to vehicles and pedestrians of the Tulane and Carrollton corridors with outdoor patio space,” the letter to MCNO says.

A third Chick-fil-A is planned for downtown, reports NOLA.com, proposed for the ground floor of the CBD building that holds Dave & Buster’s and Hurts Donuts. It would be pedestrian-only, with an entrance on Loyola Avenue.

Currently, the only Chick-fil-A’s in New Orleans are also pedestrian-only, inside buildings on the campuses of Xavier University and the University of New Orleans. There’s a drive-thru location in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans, which often has a long line of cars that spills onto Vets Boulevard. But do New Orleanians, what with our Popeyes and Raising Cane’s, but mostly the Popeyes, really want multiple area Chick-fil-A’s? Judging from the response on Twitter, maybe not — a NOLA.com tweet announcing the influx racked up dozens of side-eye comments about the chain coming to New Orleans and expressing skepticism of Torres’s involvement.

Eater has reached out to Chick-fil-A and Sherman Strategies, the company’s local land-use consultant, for comment on the proposed CBD and Mid-City restaurants and will update this story if we hear back. For the Mid-City restaurant attached to Torres, there will be neighborhood participation meetings on April 26, at noon and 6 p.m. For information on how to attend, see here.

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• Chick-fil-A’s are now flocking to New Orleans, and Sidney Torres is involved; see proposed locations [NOLA.COM]