Year of restaurant ‘musical chairs’ will be complete with Wednesday opening on Rock Road
Wichita restaurateur Jon Rolph and his Thrive Restaurant Group have been engaged in an almost yearlong game of musical chairs that will finally finish this week.
On Wednesday, Thrive group will open a new Applebee’s in the building at 3025 N. Rock Road that until earlier this year was the longtime home of Carlos O’Kelly’s. Crews completely redid the exterior and gutted the inside of the building when Carlos O’Kelly’s closed in April. That restaurant relocated to a former Applebee’s space at 11317 E. 13th St.
“We had to tear the bones out and start over,” said Dave Phillips, who is director of marketing for Thrive. “The crews really did a beautiful job.”
Thrive Restaurant Group, which also owns the Carlos O’Kelly’s chain, purchased a bunch of Applebee’s restaurants last year — the company now owns 81 — and in November of 2020, Rolph announced his plans to move a bunch of the restaurants around.
Rolph, who also bought and reopened the Applebee’s at the corner of Kellogg and Andover Road in Andover, decided he didn’t want two Applebee’s restaurants so close together. He also had long wanted to get a Carlos O’Kelly’s restaurant open on the rapidly growing Greenwich corridor but had never found just the right spot.
He decided to move the Carlos O’Kelly’s that had operated on North Rock Road since 1998 to the Applebee’s building and to move the Applebee’s to the old Carlos O’Kelly’s space.
The new Applebee’s will be open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily. Rolph will be at the site on Wednesday at 10:50 a.m. for a ribbon cutting.
Meanwhile, Thrive Restaurant Group also just opened its first HomeGrown breakfast and lunch restaurant in Kansas City. The restaurant, which is at 338 W. 63rd St. in Kansas City’s Brookside neighborhood, opened last week, and business is going well so far, Phillips said. It’s the first of what Rolph has said will be several Kansas City HomeGrown restaurants.
This story was originally published August 16, 2021 at 1:40 PM.
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