The Back Yard Burger restaurant scheduled to open in Greenwood will be the first location sporting a new look.
The restaurant will be at 514 W. Park. Ave. in the building formerly occupied by Popeyes. It will employ about 30 people.
Franchisee Nick Griffith said they would like to open it in February. He estimated the construction and conversion process would take 60 to 70 days.
Greenwood had a Back Yard Burger that opened in 1988, but it later closed.
“We’re excited to be coming back to Greenwood,” Griffith said. “We couldn’t be happier to open another business in the Delta.”
Griffith said the restaurant’s appearance will be consistent with its name — a backyard-type feel that is reinforced from the curb to the table. He said he is excited about the design changes, which have been in the works for about a year.
Some of the planned new features have been tested in Clarksdale and Cleveland, and customers have responded well to them, Griffith said.
A chain restaurant needs common threads tying its locations together, and the new motif will be “a model for the entire brand,” he said.
The restaurant will be managed by Carolyn Hood, who once ran the Shoney’s in Greenwood.
As for the food, Griffith said the restaurant will have the same emphasis on premium-quality ingredients — including Black Angus Beef — that people expect at other locations.
“We nailed the product coming out of the gate in 1987, so we’re not going to mess with that,” he said.
Griffith lives in Cleveland. He has owned a Back Yard location there since 2005 and one in Clarksdale since 2007.
He joined the company right after college. He worked in Memphis for a while, but he said he prefers the small-town setting.
“We’ve been to the rat race,” he said, “and we like living in a small town, we like raising our families in a small town and we like doing business in a small town.”
Back Yard has headquarters in Nashville, Tenn., and restaurants in 20 states.
