Selling bits of fried chicken is a hot market, and it got hotter on Monday night when the Cherry Hill Planning Board gave the go-ahead to a new entrant in the area's fast-food competition.
Raising Cane's, a Louisiana-based chain of 650 chicken-finger restaurants, received approval for its site plans to build a 3,878-square-foot store on the parking lot in the Garden State Park shopping center facing Route 70.
"I can't tell you how many people are saying to me they can't wait until this gets built," board member Marlyn Kalitan said as she cast her vote in favor of the restaurant, which had rewritten its plans after objections at the last Planning Board meeting. Monday's vote was unanimous.
Hungry kids have for decades been able to get their fill of chicken nuggets from the traditional fast-food restaurants that include them on the menu next to hamburgers and other quick eats. And fast-food sellers of chicken breasts, thighs and wings long ago added the pieces of chicken to their menus as well.Â
The Raising Cane's restaurant will fill a gap in the stores facing Route 70. Wegmans is in the background.
But the latest entrants specialize in otherwise-unrecognizable pieces of chicken, deep fried.
Consider phenomenon Chick-fil-A, which causes a stir followed by long drive-up lines when it enters a community. Plenty of them populate the greater Cherry Hill area, including in the strip of stores next to the site where Raising Cane's intends to build on the lot next to the Carhartt store, facing the westbound lane of Route 70.
That Chick-fil-A will move to the site of the now-empty Friendly's restaurant on Route 70 next to Garden State Park. The company in December got Planning Board permission to build a new Chick-fil-A there.
Around the corner, on Haddonfield Road and across from Garden State, the PDQ chicken tenders chain has a store.Â
Drive in any direction and parents eager to feed their children can find the chains saturating the market in a roll-out that almost matches the spread of Wawa and Dunkin stores.
Travel east on Route 70 and another Chick-fil-A pops up near the Marlkress Road corner.
Stay on Route 70 and just as you enter Marlton, and before the McDonald's restaurant, the Raising Cane's chain plans to add another restaurant. It received permission to do so from the Evesham Zoning Board of Adjustment in August.
Julia Doyle, Raising Cane's public relations director, told 70and73.com that restaurants in the Philadelphia area presently are the farthest north, but "we are expanding broadly into the Northeast later this year/early next year with restaurants in New Jersey, New York and more."
The Garden State Park Raising Cane's also will have a 1,385-square-foot outdoor dining area and drive-through lane.
Raising Cane's site in Cherry Hill
Raising Cane's site in Marlton
