Noodles & Co. to open new site at Towne East

The Colorado-based Noodles & Co. chain has signed a deal for a second Wichita restaurant, this time at Towne East Square .

"We just got it signed," says Angel Rogers , Towne East's director of marketing and business development.

The first Noodles will open in December at 3300 N. Rock Road across from Subway .

The Towne East Noodles, which will open in March, will be in the former Elementz space on the southeast end of the mall. It will be at a mall entrance between Von Maur and JC Penney .

Since it will have an external entrance, the 4,813-square-foot restaurant also will have a patio.

The chain sells all kinds of noodle dishes including the more exotic, such as pad Thai, to the more everyday dishes, such as mac and cheese.

Small noodle bowls are $4.25. Regular-size bowls are $5.25. Protein costs $2.25 more, and there are 14 fresh vegetables from which to choose.

There also are soups and salads.

Noodles has about 250 restaurants nationally and is rapidly expanding.

We'll keep you posted on more possible Wichita sites, including potential west-side Noodles locations.

Wichita's Jared

Call him the Jared of Wichita.

Advertisements for Medi-Weightloss Clinics are now debuting with former KSN , Channel 3 , operations manager Jerome Biggars as the company's new spokesman.

"Watch out, Jared, there's a new J in town," declares one ad, teasingly referring to Jared Fogle , famous for losing weight by eating Subway food.

Biggars lost almost 300 pounds in a 15-month period and has kept it off for two years.

"Basically, because Medi pretty much saved my life, I was just so sold on the system I started going out and talking to people," Biggars says.

That was while he was still working at KSN.

Though he liked his job at KSN, where he worked for 28 years, Biggars decided to become a national spokesman for Medi-Weightloss as his full-time job.

The response he heard from people he spoke to is part of what convinced him to make the jump.

For instance, one woman who heard him speak doesn't have a weight issue, but she says Biggars inspired her to quit smoking.

Biggars says stories like that had an effect on him.

"All the different types of rewards that were coming back to me, I just thought, I could do this full time."

He'll work part time as a patient advocate for the Medi-Weightloss in Andover. The rest of his time will be in his spokesman role for ribbon cuttings and conferences and, eventually, national ads.

Trips in his immediate future include Las Vegas and a stop at a Tucson spa.

"Not bad at all," Biggars says, laughing. "They're keeping me busy."

You don't say

"The Lone Ranger is a great myth ..."

—Attorney Dan Monnat , quoted in a profile in this year's Missouri & Kansas Super Lawyers in which he explains that teamwork is what wins cases

This story was originally published October 23, 2010 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Noodles & Co. to open new site at Towne East."