Regal Cinema will open June 20

Don’t start holding your breath just yet. The 14-screen Regal Cinema complex at Riverstone won’t open until June 20. Then, of course, grand festivities will inaugurate the 52,900-square-foot building off Northwest Boulevard, Coeur d’Alene. (A late-May opening originally was forecast).

Meanwhile, about 100,000 square feet of attached restaurants and retail shops are under construction. The cinema will be the base of an inverted U-shaped shopping center with the auxiliary shops forming the legs around a giant parking lot accessed by Riverstone Drive and Beebe Boulevard.

So far, three food/treat/beverage places have signed up for spaces attached to the south side of the cinema.

Cold Stone Creamery will be on the right corner as customers enter the theater. The store offers ice cream specially prepared on a frozen granite stone. And it serves them with a “kick.” No kidding. Prospective employees are asked to sing and dance when they interview, uh, audition, for their jobs. Usually the “interviews” are done in groups. “We sing a song and do a little dance when someone gives a tip of $1 or more,” said an employee of one of the two Spokane stores. “Usually we make up new words to an old standard tune.” In Tempe, Ariz., in 1988, Cold Stone’s founders came up with a “smooth and creamy” blend of ice cream that is in between the hard and soft-serve varieties. They discovered that mixing ingredients (including flavors and candies) on a frozen granite stone worked. One in a Spokane store is about 18 inches wide and five feet long. The ice cream is served in a fresh-baked waffle cone. The 18 flavors also can be put into spinoff desserts such as sundaes, fruit smoothies, milkshakes and chocolate dips. The Coeur d’Alene store will have about 20 employees. The company has about 100 stores with another 100 in development.

As announced in this column in March, San Francisco Sourdough was the first store to sign up for the cinema complex. The special-bread sandwich shop, which will be next to Cold Stone, is expanding from its downtown Coeur d’Alene location. Sourdoughs also are planned for Post Falls, Hayden and other Inland Northwest locations. Of course, theater customers also need coffee, so Starbucks will fill the bill. The Seattle-based company now has thousands of stores around the world. Starbucks will have its shop way around to the southeast to be the first store cinema customers see as they enter the complex parking area. It also will be visible to cars simply driving by Riverstone, so a drive-through will be handy on the Northwest Boulevard side to the northeast. At least 20 other small shops and seven larger stores are being courted for inclusion in the cinema shopping center.

At one point Red Robin Restaurant was rumored to have signed up, but Riverstone manager Mike Craven said, “It hasn’t happened.”

Pita Pit will train in Coeur d’Alene

With its headquarters now in Coeur d’Alene, Pita Pit USA will open its franchise-training store at 320 Sherman Ave. on June 10.

In early May, Coeur d’Alene doctor Jack Riggs purchased the U.S. operations of Pita Pit Inc., which include 73 current locations and deposits for 22 planned stores. The downtown Coeur d’Alene location has been the home of several restaurants, including Jimmy D’s, now in the basement across the street, and most recently the Longhorn Barbecue.

Pita Pit describes itself as a “quick-serve, fresh-thinking, healthy-eating place featuring sandwiches with choices of generous fillings in a pita wrap.”

It’s also affordable and fast. Therefore it’s found itself to be popular on or near college campuses – and locating near them is its goal, Riggs said. The company has 200 stores, including 120 in Canada. Its first U.S. store was near Syracuse University in New York, and the second was in Moscow near the University of Idaho.

It now has several Northwest locations, including Pullman, Missoula and Bozeman in the Inland Northwest. Its Web site is pitapitusa.com.