Etowah's First Fast-Food Drive-Thru Survived the Same Sewer Fight That Stalled 400 Houses
September 17, 2026
September 17, 2026
Drive the southwest corner of Old Highway 64 and Brevard Road and you will see a wedge of land barely big enough to park a school bus fleet on, let alone build a restaurant. That triangle is where Bojangles wants to put Etowah's first fast-food chicken spot. Getting there took a zoning variance, a redesigned building, and a sewer question that almost killed the whole project before it started.
The story is worth knowing not because a new drive-thru is going in, but because of what nearly stopped it. The same sewer capacity fight that has kept a proposed 400-home development off the old Etowah Valley golf course for more than two years reached into a fast-food application on a third of an acre. If you live in Etowah, that connection matters more than the menu.
The property belongs to Cold Steel & Sunshine LLC, a Brevard-based owner, and the plan calls for a drive-thru-only building with no dine-in seating and parking for just six employees. That minimal footprint was not a design choice so much as a necessity. Right-of-way claims from both Old Highway 64 and Brevard Road eat into the parcel from two directions, shrinking the buildable area from roughly three-quarters of an acre down to about a third.
Henderson County's land development code normally requires a passage lane around a drive-thru stacking lane, so cars waiting for their order do not block anyone trying to bypass the line. On a lot this tight, there was no room for one. The developer's representative, Duane Ensor, walked the county's Technical Review Committee through the constraints, and the Board of Adjustment ultimately granted a variance allowing the restaurant to skip that extra lane. It is the kind of decision that rarely makes news outside a planning agenda, but it tells you something concrete about Etowah's commercial strip along Brevard Road: the easy corners are already spoken for.
The zoning fix turned out to be the smaller obstacle. The bigger one was sewer capacity, and this is where the Bojangles story connects to something most Etowah residents have already heard about from a different direction entirely.
Henderson County bought the Etowah Sewer Company in 2024, largely to gain control over new hookups after homeowners near the Etowah Valley Golf & Resort fought a proposed 400-unit development on the golf course. Owning the utility meant the county could decide who gets to connect and who does not, and it used that leverage to help stall the housing plan. That fight over the golf course made headlines for months. What has not made as much noise is that the same sewer system is now under a state-issued moratorium on new taps, because the plant does not have the capacity to handle more flow than it already receives.
County Engineer Marcus Jones addressed the Bojangles application directly at a November 2025 technical review meeting, according to county minutes. He explained that the county had already warned the developer about the moratorium and that the plant simply does not have room for more flow than it already handles. As Jones put it, the shortfall was inherited, not created:
"That's not something we created, that's something we inherited."
The project survived because a building had previously stood on that same lot. Jones told the committee the restaurant should be able to connect as existing service rather than a new tap, sidestepping the moratorium on a technicality tied to the parcel's history rather than any change in the sewer plant's actual capacity.
That is the detail worth sitting with. A restaurant on a third of an acre nearly ran into the same infrastructure wall that has held back a much larger residential project for two years. The moratorium is not a rumor connected only to golf course politics. It is a live constraint touching ordinary commercial activity on Brevard Road right now, and any future business hoping to build somewhere in Etowah without an existing sewer connection will run into the same question.
None of this happens in a vacuum. Brevard Road already carries a real food scene, and it is worth naming what is already there before adding a new chain to the mix:
That is a fuller lineup than a lot of towns Etowah's size can claim, which makes the arrival of a national chain feel less like Etowah finally showing up on someone's map and more like one more option layered onto a corridor that was already busy.
Etowah has had a Domino's for a while, so pizza delivery was never the issue. What the community has never had is a fast-food sandwich or chicken chain, and there is still no burger franchise anywhere in Etowah or neighboring Horse Shoe. Bojangles, based in Charlotte and operating roughly 800 locations across 17 states, already runs three restaurants elsewhere in Henderson County. This would be its first foothold in Etowah specifically, filling a category gap rather than adding to an oversaturated one.
For anyone who has driven the extra fifteen minutes toward Hendersonville just to grab a biscuit on the way to work, that gap is not an abstraction. It is a specific, recognizable inconvenience that this project is aimed at closing.
As of the most recent local reporting, from December 2025, the zoning variance had been granted and the sewer connection question had been resolved in the developer's favor through the existing-service classification. No construction timeline or opening date had been announced at that point, and nothing since has surfaced to update that. Given how the site's sewer question played out, it is a fair bet that any other undeveloped or previously vacant commercial parcel along Brevard Road will face the same capacity conversation with the county before a shovel goes in the ground.
That is useful context to carry around even if you have no plans to buy or sell anything. It explains why some corners of Etowah fill in quickly while others sit empty for years, and it is the kind of detail that tells you more about how this community actually works than any list of restaurants ever could.
If you are curious how infrastructure decisions like this one tend to ripple into property values and what gets built where, the team at Homestead Realty keeps a close eye on Henderson County planning news for exactly this reason. Reach out any time you want a local read on what is changing in Etowah.
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