Next up for Chapel Hill’s University Place mall? Maybe a not so ‘boring’ Chick-fil-A
A Chapel Hill advisory board asked Chick-fil-A to tear up its plans Thursday and design a more interesting restaurant focused on pedestrians and facing University Place mall.
The 5,000-square-foot restaurant, next to Fordham Boulevard, would replace the old K&W Cafeteria, which closed in 2020. The site backs up to Binkley Baptist Church at Fordham Boulevard and Willow Drive.
“It’s quite boring, and it doesn’t really relate to the new structures that the mall is building, that are going to be right across the street,” Megan Patnaik, a Community Design Commission member, said of the Chick-fil-A plan.
She shared a photo on the company’s website of a more modern Chick-fil-A building with dark exterior features and an enclosed patio. It “fits nicely with the aesthetic that the mall is going for,” Patnaik said.
The outdoor seating area shown on the University Place plan — five tables on a raised island with drive aisles on three sides — “is not going to be a place anybody’s going to want to go,” Commissioner Scott Levitan said.
He asked development officials to bring landscape drawings and lighting designs to the next hearing. Commissioner Susana Dancy suggested a change of plans: move the building slightly west and turn it to face the mall, instead of the highway.
“If where you have that crosswalk, if you had your entrance to the building ... with the seating right there next to it, that would start to build that place where this Chick-fil-A drive-thru building, for those 12 people a day who decide to walk into the building, that experience is a positive one, and the next week, it will be 20 people,” she said.
The CDC meets at 6:30 p.m. on the fourth Tuesday of each month. It gathered Thursday to finish business held over from the Feb. 22 meeting.
Apartments, shopping, green space
The restaurant would replace a longtime Chick-fil-A inside University Place, which closed last year, leaving customers in Chapel Hill with just the Carraway Village location on Eubanks Road to get their fix.
It would have indoor and patio dining, plus two drive-through lanes wrapping the site. Mall owner Ram Realty was approved last year for six drive-thrus as part of its redevelopment plan for the 1970s mall. The multi-phased plan will start with a seven-story apartment building, ground-floor retail space and a parking deck on Willow Drive.
At full buildout, the 43-acre site could have at least 500 apartments, shops, restaurants, offices and hotel rooms, plus green spaces and a new Chapel Hill Farmer’s Market location.
Ram’s special-use permit requires the town’s Community Design Commission to sign off on each phase of construction using a set of design standards for how the project could look when completed. The council does not review or vote on individual building plans.
The CDC recently approved a Fifth Third Bank that will replace an existing but vacant bank building at the corner of Estes and Willow drives.
Other changes in the works include:
▪ Demolition of the mall’s eastern end, including the former A Southern Season store
▪ Two buildings across the Fordham Boulevard entrance from the proposed Chick-fil-A, with space for five more retailers
▪ Two kiosk-style buildings anchoring the northern and southern ends of a new public green, which is replacing part of the existing mall and the Southern Season parking lot
▪ Two large buildings planned for the Estes Drive entrance near the Kangaroo gas station
The mall’s remaining interior space is being renovated into storefronts facing the parking lot, which could create room for a Kidzu Children’s Museum expansion, a new food hall and another junior anchor, leasing documents show.
This story was originally published March 11, 2022 at 12:53 PM.
