The latest addition to the growing downtown dining scene is The Salad Station, which opened in mid-October on the ground floor of the Commerce Building adjacent to Magpie Cafe.
Currently, the new restaurant is only open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. to capitalize on the downtown lunch crowd. But manager Jake Cavana says The Salad Station will experiment with its hours in the coming weeks and may try opening on Saturday mornings to take advantage of regulars that come to the weekly Farmer’s Market.
Cavana says there isn’t sufficient demand yet for the restaurant to serve dinner, though that may change in the future. Magpie Café’s owners came to that conclusion earlier this year, when they stopped serving dinner and began closing at 6 p.m.
At the time, Magpie’s owner James Jacobs said downtown was a great location but that it “wasn’t quite ready” for a late-night café.
With the completion of the 146-unit Heron Downtown multifamily complex three blocks from the Commerce Building and recently announced plans for 150 new residential units in the Chase South Tower, Cavana hopes demand for 24/7 downtown dining options will rise.
“With all those new units coming on line, it’s going to be interesting to see how demand pans out,” he says.
The downtown restaurant is the third location for The Salad Station, a Hammond chain that began expanding out of state earlier this year. But it is the first franchisee-owned Salad Station store in the market. The other two locations in Baton Rouge—on Perkins Road and on Coursey Boulevard—are company-owned.
Cavana says the Baton Rouge-based franchise group he works for, Unicom LLC, plans to open several additional Salad Station restaurants in the market and is currently scouting for locations near Towne Center, College Drive, and Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, among others.
“We want to target high volume areas with a lot of lunch traffic,” he says. “So we’re also looking near Woman’s Hospital, anywhere around LSU or Southdowns. We’re looking to target that heavy lunch population and steady business.”
