NEW RESTAURANT FOR WINROCK
FAST-CASUAL PIZZA CHAIN PICKS ABQ FOR FIRST EXPANSION OUTSIDE ARIZONA
Sauce Pizza & Wine, based in Arizona, picks Albuquerque for its first out-of-state expansion.
An Arizona restaurant chain has picked the Duke City for its first out-of-state expansion — and has already signed a lease to put its initial Albuquerque location at Winrock Town Center. Sauce Pizza & Wine expects to open at Winrock by next summer. The Scottsdale-headquartered company is already hunting for additional Albuquerque locations with an eye toward having at least three in the market, CEO Scott Kilpatrick said.
Albuquerque “just made sense” for the company that currently has eight locations in the Phoenix metro and four in Tucson, he said.
“We want to take the brand and grow it outside the state of Arizona,” Kilpatrick said. “We’ve been talking about where we think would be best to go, and what we see in Albuquerque is, its pretty similar to Tucson in terms of the size of the city and the university. Our four stores in Tucson do extremely well, and we saw it as a market similar to that.”
Sauce will enter the market via The Corner @ Winrock, a shops-style building now under construction on the north side of the Uptown property. The chain will lease a 3,000-square-foot space that faces the hard corner of Indian School and Uptown, said Anthony Johnson of Pegasus Retail, which is leading the leasing effort at Winrock.
Other previously announced tenants for The Corner include a Mark Pardo hair salon, Old Town Olive and Village Nails. Johnson said negotiations continue with additional businesses for the remaining spaces. Winrock developer Goodman Realty Group expects to complete major construction on the building within the next few months, turning it over to tenants for their own interior buildouts by early 2017, Johnson said.
While Sauce’s tag line is “pizza & wine,” Kilpatrick said the small chain sells more salads than anything, and the housemade menu options also includes paninis and pastas. The average customer check is around $11 and the setup is what the CEO calls “modified fast casual;” customers order at a counter but servers deliver the food, refill drinks and bus tables.
Sauce originated in 2003 in Tucson. It was started by Sam Fox of Fox Restaurant Concepts, a well-regarded Arizona company with 15 different brands, including True Food Kitchen and Zinburger.
Johnson said Sauce brings with it a certain prestige that could spell good things for the future of the Albuquerque market.
“The restaurant world community knows (what’s happening here),” he said. “They all talk; they’ll see this happening and it’s going to put Albuquerque on the map for a different level of restaurant.”