A cardboard box of potatoes sat by the front door on opening morning, a hand-lettered sign poking out of it that read "future fries." Behind the counter, staff loaded the spuds into a cart bound for the kitchen while a small crowd waited for the ribbon to drop. It was Monday, September 14, 2026, and Rocky's Burgers, Franks and Fries had just opened in the same Williston Square building that spent the previous four years as Slim Chickens.
That detail, more than the potatoes, is the story. Slim Chickens broke ground at Williston Square in September 2021 as one of the very first businesses to commit to the development. It opened in April 2022. By this August, it was gone, closed by its own owner and replaced within weeks by a different concept from the same restaurant group. Meanwhile, the two names everyone in town has been talking about since spring, Target and Chick-fil-A, are both still mid-construction a few hundred yards away. The square's oldest tenant didn't survive long enough to see its newest anchors open.
If you eat in that part of town with any regularity, that timing gap tells you something the announcements never do: the lineup at Williston Square is not settled. It's still shaking out, restaurant by restaurant, and the pace of change has nothing to do with how big or small the name on the door is.
The building that already changed its name
Mike Sartwell's company, Preferred Restaurant Group, has been part of Williston's restaurant scene for years, going back to when it bought the local Taco John's franchise, then located behind Simonson's, before that restaurant moved to its current spot on Second Avenue West in 2005. Slim Chickens was the group's next move, and it opened at Williston Square in April 2022 as one of the development's first restaurants.
Four years later, it was one of the weaker performers in the company's portfolio, and Sartwell rebranded it rather than continuing to run it as Slim Chickens. The replacement, Rocky's, wasn't a new idea born out of Williston's slowdown. It's an existing concept Sartwell opened first in Minot two years ago and then in Fargo last November. Williston is its third North Dakota location, and the same building now serves never-frozen steak burgers, all-beef hot dogs, and fresh-cut fries instead of chicken tenders.
"As soon as that was a success, we knew we wanted to come to Williston," Sartwell said of the Fargo location's performance. "We love doing business here."
He's framed the whole approach around bridging two things that don't usually sit together. "We kind of bridge that gap between people that want a really high quality, fresh product, and they want it with the convenience of a drive-through," he said. The company plans to keep opening Rocky's locations across the state, alongside additional Slim Chickens elsewhere, which suggests Williston's closure was about that specific location's numbers, not a retreat from the market.
How long everything else took to open
The Rocky's turnaround, from closure to reopening in a matter of weeks, stands out even more once you line it up against how long everything else at Williston Square has taken to actually open its doors.
| Business | Announced or broke ground | Opened | Time to open |
|---|---|---|---|
| Slim Chickens (now Rocky's) | Groundbreaking, September 2021 | April 2022 | About 7 months |
| Taco Bell | Announced 2022 | Opened roughly three years later | About 3 years |
| Pizza Ranch | Purchase agreement, 2021 | February 16, 2026 | About 6 years |
| Target | Purchase agreement, January 21, 2026 | Under construction | Ongoing |
| Chick-fil-A | Announced April 16, 2026, groundbreaking June 12, 2026 | Targeting fall 2026 | Ongoing |
Pizza Ranch is the clearest example of how unpredictable this has been. Williston first heard it was coming in 2021. It didn't open until a Monday morning in February 2026, and when it finally did, people lined up about an hour before the doors opened. One customer, Kelli Vineyard, drove more than 80 miles from Plentywood, Montana for the occasion. Dickinson franchise owner Jason Frederick, who has run that city's location for a decade, built the Williston store to seat around 200 people and added a Fun Zone Arcade with birthday party rooms, a feature Pizza Ranch has only recently started rolling into new locations.
Taco Bell took three years from announcement to opening. Slim Chickens, by contrast, went from breaking ground to serving customers in about seven months back in 2021 and 2022, before it quietly became one of the square's weaker performers and got rebranded four years later.
Former Williston Economic Development Executive Director Shawn Wenko summed up the unpredictability of the whole project well when Target and Chick-fil-A were first announced. Williston Mayor Howard Klug put it this way at the time:
"The hours of recruitment, planning, engineering and design of Williston Square created the edges of a giant puzzle that needs to be completed. It all started with Genesis, a local business, and then the restaurants came, and now a major anchor that will attract other retailers. Our team will continue until the puzzle is complete. Nobody knows how long it will take, but it will be beautiful when it is finished."
That sentiment holds up. Nobody, including the city, has been able to predict how long any single piece of this square would take, whether it's a fast-casual chicken chain or a national retailer.
What's actually under construction right now
As of this month, Target and Chick-fil-A are both active construction sites, not finished storefronts. Target signed its purchase agreement for the 134,000-square-foot store on January 21, 2026, paying $1.5 million for 16 acres just west of the existing restaurant row. Economic Development Director Anna Nelson has confirmed there's no public timeline yet for a grand opening, and the city itself has noted that similarly sized projects here have taken years rather than months to materialize.
Chick-fil-A moved faster on paper. The city announced the deal on April 16, 2026, and crews broke ground less than two months later on June 12, tied to the city's Economic Development Week. A spokesperson for the chain said at the time that the location would create between 80 and 120 jobs and that an opening as early as this fall was possible, pending delays. Nelson described "a lot of progress" at both sites in a recent update, but neither has opened as of this writing.
That's worth sitting with if you're the kind of person who plans a lunch route around what's actually open, not what's been announced. Right now, the standing lineup at Williston Square includes Genesis, the locally owned clothing store that was the first business to acquire land there, Taco Bell, 7 Brew Drive-Thru Coffee (open since December 2025), Pizza Ranch, and the brand-new Rocky's. Target and Chick-fil-A are still weeks or months out. The square is also adding an ice and turf facility and a D-BAT baseball training center, both announced this year, which says something about where the development is headed beyond food and retail, even if those aren't open yet either.
What this actually means if you eat there
The lesson isn't that Williston Square is unstable. It's that the square is still assembling itself, and the businesses that look permanent today aren't guaranteed to be there in three years, especially the ones that got there first. Slim Chickens had a four-year head start on Target and Chick-fil-A and still didn't make it to see them open. That's not a knock on the location. It's a reminder that being early to a growing commercial node carries its own kind of risk, and that risk doesn't disappear just because a big national name is about to move in next door.
If you're a regular at any of the smaller, newer spots out there, the practical takeaway is simple: check before you drive over, especially with something you haven't visited in a few months. The fastest way to keep up is to watch the City of Williston's economic development announcements directly, since that's where changes like the Rocky's rebrand and the Target and Chick-fil-A construction updates get confirmed first, well before word spreads elsewhere.
Williston Square has been reshuffling since the day Genesis broke ground, and there's no reason to think this is the last swap before Target's doors finally open. The square's story so far is less about which brand shows up next and more about how quickly the ones already there can change shape.
If you're keeping an eye on how a corner of town like Williston Square shifts, that same kind of close, current read is exactly what Carla Kemp brings to every conversation about buying, selling, or simply understanding what a neighborhood is becoming next. Reach out anytime you want a local read on what's actually happening on the ground here.
