Little Rock restaurant group Yellow Rocket Concepts on Monday announced that it was opening a Big Orange in Rogers, its first restaurant outside central Arkansas.
Scheduled to open in late fall 2017, Big Orange Northwest will be the third Big Orange. The 5,200-SF restaurant will be in the Pinnacle Hills Promenade at 2203 S. Promenade Blvd. It will seat about 158.
Yellow Rocket Concepts also operates the restaurants Zaza, Local Lime and Heights Taco & Tamale Co., as well as Lost Forty Brewing.
In addition to Big Orange's burgers and other menu items, Big Orange Northwest will offer "expanded small plates and starter dishes, hyper-local food and beverage selections, house-made desserts, and dangerously delicious spiked milkshakes," according to a news release from Yellow Rocket.
The restaurant, BONW, will also have a full bar, craft cocktails, 20 draft beers (as well as canned and bottled beer), draft wine and nonalcoholic draft beverages.
"BONY will host annual beer, wine, and spirit dinners, as well as pop-up bar dinner experiences," Yellow Rocket said.
Big Orange first opened in 2011 and has won a number of awards.
"I was born at Washington Regional in Fayetteville while my dad played for the Arkansas Razorbacks," Scott McGehee, a partner in Yellow Rocket and YRC executive chef, said in the release. "I returned to Fayetteville to attend the University of Arkansas before leaving for culinary school. Sharing my team's passion for thoughtfully prepared, delicious burgers with our friends in Northwest Arkansas will be the most wonderful homecoming I could imagine."
McGehee's father, Frank McGehee, who died in 2005, helped found Juanita's, a popular restaurant and live music venue that closed in December 2015.
Yellow Rocket, which employs about 470, last year paid $825,000 for a 2-acre property in Riverdale, including two buildings comprising 11,150 SF, to serve as the company's new corporate headquarters. It brought in $10.8 million in food sales alone in 2014, the last year for which figures were available.