New Sonic location ready to open in DeKalb

DeKALB – Marquita Head, a social psychology major at Northern Illinois University, has been in DeKalb four years and said she is tired of the same old restaurants.

Now that a new Sonic restaurant is opening Friday at 1115 W. Lincoln Highway, Head said she definitely will be going to order a shake.

“I’m looking forward to it, and I hope there’s good customer service,” Head said.

Great news, Marquita: About
45 employees have been training at the Aurora location the past several weeks to prepare for the opening. Eventually, staff will be reduced to about 20 to 25 people, franchisee Seth Wolken said.

“We’ve been trying to put these guys in real situations on how to deal with real guests,” Wolken said.

The former home to the KFC and Long John Silver’s hybrid restaurant has been under renovation for months and is set to have its grand opening at 10 a.m. Friday.

Shortly after a ribbon-cutting, Sonic will start serving customers. It will be open from 6 a.m. to midnight seven days a week.

Although Sonic traditionally is known as a drive-in restaurant and this location initially was introduced as one, it instead will feature a dining room and drive-thru. Wolken said this was one of the first stores to not be built from the ground up, and the lot it sits on was too small to accommodate the drive-in format.

“Sonic has started to embrace the dining room concept,” Wolken said. “Sonic is a Southern brand but recognized that winters up here are difficult, so in order to be competitive, we need to offer these things.”

It was a disappointment, however, not to have the restaurant’s signature service, Wolken said.

“It was a bummer for us, and our expectations are a little bit different, but I think we can still do a good job delivering the Sonic experience,” he said. “I’m grateful for the city to set it up as we did, because we would have been so limited on parking.”

According to the terms of a special use permit to allow the development, which was approved in February by the City Council, Wolken’s ownership group, Boom Enterprises, must donate $5,000 to the city for future decorative lighting along Lincoln Highway and will consent to the establishment of a backup special service area.

Wolken said the restaurant was inspected and approved earlier this week by the DeKalb County Health Department, and it had another inspection Thursday.

The closest Sonic locations to DeKalb are in Algonquin, Aurora and Rockford, which all are about 25 miles away.

The DeKalb location will offer the same special promotions as other restaurants, such as happy hour, during which all drinks and slushes are half-price between 2 and 4 p.m.

After visiting with other nearby food chains – such as Popeye’s, Jersey Mike’s and Dunkin’ Donuts – Wolken said the entire business community has been very welcoming.

“They’ve been very helpful and open, and it’s nice to be in a community that’s embracing,” Wolken said. “The city of DeKalb is a great community, and NIU will bring tremendous business for us.”

He said that the store will be accepting Huskie Bucks, an NIU prepaid debit account system, to accommodate students.

Nicholas Rosso, a computer science major at NIU, said he has never visited a Sonic and didn’t know whether they offered anything different from other popular fast-food venues. He would, however, consider going for a weekend snack or a shake. He said few places have good ones around campus.

“It may be different than the other fast-food places, but there are a lot of good choices for food here,” Rosso said.

Jahred Nixon, an NIU sports management graduate student, and Milton Spaulding, an NIU exercise physiology graduate student, said there are a lot of Sonic locations in the St. Louis area where they’re from. Nixon said he likely will be ordering burgers and slushes.

“I like it a lot, and it’s nice to have more variety,” Nixon said. “Once it’s opened, it will get my business for sure.”