HARLINGEN – The restaurant which defines “fast-casual” dining is coming to Harlingen.
Chipotle’s Mexican Restaurants Inc. confirmed this week the company is renovating the old Discount Tire building on Dixieland Road near West Tyler Avenue to put in a Chipotle’s.
The restaurant should open this fall, said Danielle Moore, public relations and communications manager for the company. Like all Chipotle restaurants, the new Harlingen location will not be a franchise but will be corporate-owned.
The arrival of Chipotle’s is the latest news in the rapidly developing restaurant and retail world for Harlingen.
Last month, it was reported a Cheddar’s restaurant would locate in a development on Stuart Place Road. In the same development, locally owned Texas Regional Bank is planning to build a new headquarters.
In addition, a new Five Below discount store and an America’s Best Contacts and Eyeglasses will locate at Harlingen Corners. A Hooters restaurant also is in the beginning construction phase at the corner of Dixieland Road and West Harrison Avenue.
In the Valley, Chipotle’s currently has restaurants in Weslaco, Edinburgh and McAllen. Fast-casual dining is a relatively new restaurant category, which Chipotle has helped pioneer.
The sudden surge of new retail businesses in the city is a happy spinoff from increasingly available jobs from larger businesses that have located or expanded here, said Chris Gonzales, chief executive officer for the Harlingen Chamber of Commerce.
Gonzales cited large employers such as the call centers in Harlingen, as well as the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and the medical school as having created the kind of jobs base in the Valley which retailers are seeking to serve.
“The Harlingen Economic Development Corporation and the city are doing a good job laying the foundation,” Gonzales said this week.
“We all receive the benefits from this because we all get more places to shop,” said Gonzales, who added the flood of new restaurants and retail businesses is only just beginning.
“A lot of times, you want things to happen overnight,” he said. “But that’s just not the way things develop.”
