A Texas-based chain restaurant will open in the former Drago’s building along Johnston Street in Lafayette next summer.
The restaurant will open at 3151 Johnston St. after the owner, an LLC registered to Yi Cheng Zheng of Houston, bought the building and assumed the lease on the land underneath it earlier this month, court records show.
Sophie Zhoa, whose firm Beyond Realty represented the buyer in the deal, declined to give specifics but indicated the business will need about 10 months of interior renovation work before it will open.
Details will be released later, she said.
Zheng bought the building from New Orleans-based Select Properties for just under $1 million and will lease the land from PA Judice Corp., which owns 14 acres at that corner, records show.
There’s been visible activity at the site, but no building permit has been approved by Lafayette Consolidated Government.
The restaurant will be the latest to occupy the space, which has been empty since Drago’s closed in early 2024 following a six-year run. It’s a space that has had so many previous businesses open and close that The Mellow Mushroom held an exorcism at the site before opening in 2014, archives show.
It closed three years later.
Access to the building is not great, said Rex Moroux, commercial real estate agent with Scout Real Estate, and the tenant has to share parking with Corner Bar and the movie theater next door. Requiring businesses to lease the land while owning the building can also make it less attractive to a buyer, he said.
“It’s very mysterious often times,” Moroux said. “It’s based on perception. That’s really a hard thing to pin down. Something fails five or six times, and the public perception is it can’t succeed.”
Other businesses that once called that location home include Tex-Mex restaurant Bako’s that closed in 2011, Serrano’s Salsa Co. that closed in 2007 and U.S. Border Cantina & Grill that filed for bankruptcy in early 1997 after opening the previous year, archives show.
A Shoe Town store may have been the first to occupy that space in the mid-1980s.
Dining and Cooking