Cold Beer & Cheeseburgers looking at summer opening

Sonoran Creek Marketplace will get a new tenant and the city a new sit-down restaurant next summer when Cold Beers & Cheeseburgers opens on the north end of the newly minted retail plaza. According to the real estate broker who spearheaded the deal to get CB&C to town, the market is ripe for such an offering.

“I’m super excited about what’s happening down there in Maricopa with the growth and an educated workforce,” said Chuck Wells, a Senior Vice President at Kidder Mathews retail real estate brokerage in Phoenix. “We like that; it’s a clean city and there’s pride of ownership down there. When I finally drag people (from the restaurant industry) down there, they come back and go, ‘Yeah, we need to be here.’”

The restaurant will sit on the north end of the center, just down the mall from Sprouts, currently is in the permitting process with the city. Wells said the timing is coming along as expected and bring something to the city’s dining menu that it doesn’t currently have.

“I would say they will probably be opening in the summer,” he said. “It’s a family restaurant that is sports themed and will have a very large indoor space and patio. The patio will cantilever out over the retention basin there. They’re going to do very well down there.”

Tracy Frazier, the chief operating officer of the Scottsdale-based restaurant chain, said the company has been looking at a location for Maricopa for quite some time.

“The demographics really support a location there,” Frazier said. “We’ve looked at Maricopa a handful of times in the past few years. That market is dramatically underserved for sit-down restaurants.”

Frazier said the restaurant will occupy a pad behind Culver’s in Sonoran Creek Marketplace at the southwest corner of Edison Road and John Wayne Parkway. The Maricopa restaurant will be the company’s 13th location.

He added the “neighborhood burger joint” here will have a dramatic distinguishing feature.

“The location there in Maricopa will have the biggest functioning bar at any location in Arizona,” Frazier said. “It will be a 50-foot bar that will have 20 televisions over the bar.”

Wells added that the venue will be ideal for fans looking to watch their favorite teams in cool comfort. “Their audio/video package is very strong,” he said.

The restaurant will be span approximately 5,000 square feet and will have about 2,000 more square feet of patio space. Most of the company’s patios feature roll-up garage doors, indoor/outdoor bars for direct service and high-top community tables with built-in beer coolers.