Collin Street Bakery Restaurant chooses a site in Lindale. Tom Boone, Editor, Lindale News & Times (Edited by John Clary) | 11-Sep-2009
Collin Street Bakery, based in Corsicana, Texas and known internationally for its fruitcakes and other fresh-baked goods, has chosen a site in Lindale to construct a restaurant in their new concept design. Company representative, Robert Means addressed the Lindale City Council and said a contract on the Lindale facility should close soon, and construction would start immediately on a 6,357 square foot restaurant-bakery.
This will be the third of its kind since Collin Street Bakery began branching out into the restaurant business in recent years. The other two are in Corsicana on I-45, and in north Waco on I-35. The Lindale restaurant will be located on the Northeast corner of I-20 and FM 849, near the front gate of Hideaway Lake.
Means said the company had spent two years looking for the right place to locate its next restaurant/bakery and settled on the Lindale location because it is on a heavily traveled interstate highway equidistant between Dallas and Shreveport, and is close to Hideaway as well as Tyler.
Means also noted that "Collin Street Bakery has more customers in Smith County than there are people in Navarro County," He was referring to the mail order business that sends Collin Street products to an international customer base.
The facility will virtually duplicate ones in Corsicana and Waco, and will feature a Southern Plantation style architecture with a wide porch and columns and an entryway that directs customers one way to the food service and another way into the baked goods section. Means said the restauant will serve sandwiches, soups, salads, gourmet coffees and fountain drinks. It will also offer Collin Street's world famous fruitcakes, cakes, pies, fresh baked breads, cookies and other pastries.
The Collin Street Bakery, which Means said is still one of the few scratch bakeries left int he country, was started in 1896 by German immigrants who built a huge plant in downtown Corsicana. It got its start as a mail order business thanks to circus mogul John Ringling, who brought his entire traveling troup into the bakery one day and ordered fruitcakes to be mailed out to his circus friends throughout Europe. This year the bakery is expected to send orders to people in 196 foreign countries.
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