Whataburger tries for new spot in this SC city after residents reject first choice. Here’s where
Where once there were no Whataburgers in South Carolina, now there are plans for about a dozen.
Several are already under construction. Others are in the planning stage and now two more are in the approval process in the city of Greenville.
The newest is on the site of what was TGI Fridays on Woodruff Road in a highly commercial zone around Magnolia Park shopping area.
Whataburger officials attended an informal Project Preview Meeting on Tuesday and said they would apply to open a 24-hour restaurant with drive-thru and indoor dining there. The Board of Zoning Appeals will consider whether to grant operations overnight in May.
Last year, that board denied a similar application for a location on Laurens Road, where neighbors complained about noise, lighting and odors from a drive thru.
The company’s new application will be considered at the April 11 Board of Zoning Appeals meeting.
The Zoning Commission staff report says the company addressed the concerns.
Whataburger submitted a map showing lighting levels, a general noise/sound map for their box speaker and promised a security guard would be on duty each night to address any nuisance and traffic issues.
In addition, the business will close the outermost drive-thru lane and cars would exit to Laurens Road instead of through the neighborhood.
Whataburger has also agreed to build a landscaping buffer between the business and the neighborhood.
The Technical Advisory Committee has recommended the board approve the special exemption to allow 24- hour operations.
The committee said the zoning board should require the company to turn off dining room lights from midnight to 5 a.m., have a manager on site all hours, and asks for specific vegetation be planted: a row of Chinese Fringe Flower shrubs, eight Shumard or Nuttall Oak trees, a second row of dense, evergreen shrubs, such as Cypress, Juniper, Boxwood, or Burford Holly, interspersed between the planned trees, and a solid, 8-foot opaque fence.
A lawsuit Whataburger filed against the zoning board claiming the denial was arbitrary is still pending.
In Greenville County, Whataburger is already building locations in Mauldin and on Woodruff Road outside the Greenville city limits.
Also under construction are Whataburgers in Anderson and Spartanburg counties.
Other restaurants are planned for Irmo, Lexington and Easley.
A spokesman for Whataburger could not be reached for comment.
Whataburger was founded in 1950 as a roadside burger stand by Harmon Dobson in Corpus Christi, Texas.
Dobson died in a private plane crash in 1967, and his wife Grace took over the company. By the time she died in 2005 at age 80, the company had grown to 600 stores.
The family sold its majority interest in the company In 2019 to Chicago-based investment firm BDT Capital, which began the expansion program.
They commemorated their 1,000th restaurant in January, when two locations, corporate-owned Atlanta, Georgia, and franchise-owned Yukon, Oklahoma. Since then, another restaurant opened in Las Vegas.
