Aurora wants more restaurants

Aurora has several popular restaurants/fast food places, such as McDonalds, Steak and Shake, Subway, and more, but there are many Aurora does not have.

Students constantly travel outside of Aurora, driving 15 minutes to even 30 minutes just for certain food. Although there are some places close by like Chipotle and Panera in Twinsburg, many can be far away like Chick-fil-A, Swenson’s, Cane’s, Insomnia Cookies, 5 Guy’s, and Piada. There are plenty more restaurants, but these just happen to be the most popular among our student body based on a survey from earlier this week.

Aurora students don’t have much of a choice between resturants; fighting for a table and waiting an eternity for service is part of choosing to get food on a Friday night after a football game. Most people have accepted this, but others want more.

Towns have many reasons for not including certain restaurants; Aurora’s “fancy” restaurants are not typically chains. Places like 1815 Tavern, Mad Jacks, Mason Jar, and Cutting Board are locally owned restaurants with only one or two locations. It gives of the comforting feel of a small, quaint town without the busy of the city. Therefore, it would be unrealistic to throw a Cheesecake Factory into the middle of town.

Another answer could be the way that resturants measure their customers distances from the restaurants. Whenever a customer pays for food, where they live can be tracked. The restaurant then looks at their location and calculates how many customers they get, from how far. This means they can tell how many people are willing to travel far distances to get food from their restaurant.

If there are 0 or few people going to a certain restaurant then a company will see no point in building the restaurant in our town. Yet, if there’s many people company’s could also assume people are willing to travel the long distance and don’t need to build another restaurant.

It also could be the distance between each restaurant. It would be unrealistic for Panera to build another restaurant in Aurora since they already have one is Twinsburg, Solon, Bainbridge, and Hudson. The company may have rules in place to prohibit this altogether.

So how do we get the restaurants we want? There’s no easy answer. It needs to be a mass movement with lots of communication and attention from the community to really get something done. Contacting the company alone will not get you the answer you want, but also asking our own mayor. Hopefully one day they’ll be more that one hot spot on Friday nights.