Business

Buffalo Wild Wings opening slated for late next week

BARBARAELLEN KOCH PHOTO | Buffalo Wild Wings will open next Friday or Saturday, store manager Andrew Schuett said Thursday.
BARBARAELLEN KOCH PHOTO | Buffalo Wild Wings will open next Friday or Saturday, store manager Andrew Schuett said Thursday.

Almost two months after its original launch date came and went, Buffalo Wild Wings in Riverhead is now slated to open for business Feb. 7 or 8, store manager Andrew Schuett said Thursday.

“It should be Friday or Saturday of next week,” Mr. Schuett said, adding that he’s waiting for confirmation of the exact date from Buffalo Wild Wing’s corporate offices in Minneapolis. “It’s an exciting time.”

The news comes two days after the Route 58 restaurant, which is located in a shopping plaza just east of Riverhead Raceway and was supposed to open Dec. 9, received final approval from the Suffolk County Department of Health Services.

At the beginning of the month, Ms. Kelly-McGovern said Buffalo Wild Wing’s neighbors in the plaza — Dick’s Sporting Goods, Aldi, Christmas Tree Shops and Five Below — were all operating without final approval. The shopping plaza’s developer, Saber-Riverhead LLC, incurred a $10,000 fine for doing so, she said.

Unlike the other stores in the plaza, executives at Buffalo Wild Wings chose not to open the Riverhead location until everything was “100 percent right,” Mr. Schuett said earlier this month.

Some employees, he said, were assigned to other locations for training while the restaurant waited to open. They’ll receive a “refresher” training course at the Riverhead eatery, he said.

“We wanted to do this two months ago,” he said of the restaurant’s new opening date. “We’re excited to take care of the guests who have wanted to come here and to get our employees working. We just want to move forward and be part of the community.”

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