For Kent’s Tammy Fort, it was worth the wait.<\/p>\n
Hungry customers welcomed the opening of the new Sonic Drive-In on a sun-splashed Monday at the northeast corner of 116th Avenue Southeast and KentKangley <\/a>Road<\/a>.<\/p>\n Fort and her family were the first in line at 9:25 a.m., 35 minutes before the doors officially opened.<\/p>\n “It’s great,” she said after enjoying a jalapeno-loaded supersonic breakfast burrito. “We always go to one in Texas, so we were excited when they opened one here. … We just got out of school, so it was on our summer bucket list.”<\/p>\n Other customers trickled in, then a steady line formed in the drive-thru and the classic outdoor-service stalls were filled. By the noon hour, the restaurant was jammed.<\/p>\n “Once the word of mouth gets around, it’s going to pick up in the evening,” said Jake Nelson, who co-owns and operates the restaurant with Jasmin Patel.<\/p>\n So far, as Patel noted, all was going well with the steady stream of customers.<\/p>\n Sonic observes a limited schedule for its Monday opening – from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. – and then kicks in a full schedule starting July 1 with hours of 7 a.m. to midnight, said Rune Harkestad, vice president of Kidder Mathews, a commercial real estate firm in Bellevue.<\/p>\n The new location on East Hill represents the 18th Sonic in the state and the ninth in the greater Puget Sound region.<\/p>\n The Kent Sonic hired 95 part- and full-time jobs, according to Nelson.<\/p>\n Sonic started in 1953 in Oklahoma and has more than 3,500 locations in 45 states. It serves about 3 million customers daily and features carhops at many locations. Sonic is known by many for its funny television commercials featuring two guys sitting in a car at the drive-thru talking about their orders.<\/p>\n Kent will get another highly anticipated burger spot in October when Dick’s Drive-In is scheduled to open on the West Hill at 24200 Pacific Highway S.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" New location on East Hill represents the 18th Sonic in the state, ninth regionally <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":538,"featured_media":35391,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,9],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-35390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-home"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35390"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/538"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35390\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35390"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=35390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}