The new Gold Star Chili location on Winston Avenue in Latonia is built and ready for hungry customers on Tuesday.
The brand new building stands where Long John Silver’s sat took about six months to build and become ready for business. The Gold Star franchise operated a few blocks down on Winston for 43 years before the big move.
On Monday, owner Wafa David, hosted a VIP lunch to showcase the new digs and to show off the new menu items like fresh burgers (the bacon and bleu cheese is highly recommended!), Parmesan fries, super-loaded chili cheese fries, a new salad line including a harvest grilled-chicken salad, a barbecue chicken salad and lots more.
“People are really thrilled with our new burgers,” David said. “They love the décor of the store.”
The Gold Star franchise was started by four brothers from Jordan who originally started a place called Hamburger Heaven where they also made Cincinnati-style chili but noticed that the chili became more popular than the burgers and the brothers focused their business on chili from that point on.
“We went back to the roots with the Hamburger Heaven with the new burger line,” said Local Store Marketing Coordinator Jamie Pollard.
The new store is significantly larger than the previous location with more parking around the store and, for the first time, a drive-thru. The facility upgrade required David to hire 14 additional employees to work at the new store.
“With the bigger place and the drive through, we’re going to have more traffic coming through and we wanted to make sure people are taken care of with service. Especially when you have a new menu line, we have to make sure people have their food on time,” David said.
On Tuesday, the doors will open to the public for the first time in what is described as a soft opening. A more elaborate grand opening is scheduled for a ribbon cutting sometime in February.
Story & photos by Bryan Burke, associate editor