Update on the west-side Paris Baguette that was announced more than 2 years ago
More than two years ago — back in June 2023 — the local franchisees for the Paris Baguette chain announced that they were adding a west-side store. They’d opened their first location of the bakery at 9780 E. 21st St. in November 2022.
Much has happened since then, including the franchisees picking an entirely different piece of property for the west-side restaurant. But there hasn’t been any kind of update since January, when Mike Issa said that he and business partner Moe Touffaha would likely have the west-side Paris Baguette open by April 2025 — now nearly five months ago.
This week, Issa provided a bit of an update on the restaurant, which is taking over the old Hardee’s building at 13th and Tyler. Typical delays slowed the process, he said, and he now estimates that the new Paris Baguette will be ready to open within four to six weeks.
Issa said he should have more solid information in about two weeks.
“It’s just construction delays,” he said of the holdup.
Months ago, the exterior of the red brick building got a white coat of paint, and Issa said that crews are now working on the interior remodel.
Issa and Touffaha, who also are IHOP franchisees, originally selected a piece of property on the northeast corner 29th and Ridge Road for the west-side Paris Baguette. They planned to put it in a new strip center they would build and hoped to have it open by summer 2024.
But once they’d moved dirt and were ready to start construction on the site, they realized that the city would require them to build farther back from the road than they’d planned, and with that change, the lot would be too small.
A year ago, they announced that they’d found a new spot and that they would transform the building at 13th and Tyler that Hardee’s vacated in April 2023 into their new Paris Baguette. They were happy with the change, they said at the time, because the building already had a drive-through window and their use of it would make their store one of the few Paris Baguettes in the world that had a drive-through window.
Paris Baguette, which started in South Korea in 1988, specializes in French-inspired cakes and pastries and also serves sandwiches and salads as well as a line of coffee and tea. Issa and Touffaha fell in love with the concept during their travels to New York City.
On Sunday, Issa and Touffaha closed their IHOP in Derby, saying that traffic was too slow. But they still own the IHOP restaurants on North Rock Road and on East Kellogg and have about 14 others around the region. They will soon add three or four more in Kansas, Missouri and New Mexico.
Kansas City-based breakfast chain The Big Biscuit will take over the Derby IHOP building, though that restaurant likely won’t be open until the second half of 2026.
This story was originally published September 23, 2025 at 2:35 PM.
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