All Up in Your Business

Franklin Street gets a new burger place

Starting in July, Al’s Burger Shack will be serving burgers with a local focus out of 516 W. Franklin St.

Owner Al Bowers said the restaurant focuses on locally sourced, fresh ingredients and sustainability.

The menu will feature all-natural, pasture-raised beef from a farm near Davidson, Bowers said. Al’s Burger Shack also partnered with several local businesses to supply buns, hot dogs and custard.

Hillsborough’s Maple View Farm will provide the custard used in milk shakes and a specialty dessert called “the sweet burger.”

“We’re trying to source as much as we can locally,” Bowers said.

Prices will range from around $3 to $10, and burger varieties will include turkey, tuna, salmon, lamb and shrimp.

Despite the absence of students, Bowers said opening in the summer will help restaurant workers learn to run the restaurant smoothly.

“I look at that as an advantage,” Bowers said. “It allows us to really do a lot of marketing and work out all the kinks to get ready for when the town doubles in population in the fall when school starts.”

Once it’s up and running, Bowers hopes Al’s Burger Shack will be a place for people of all backgrounds to come together and enjoy a relaxed atmosphere and good food.

“We’re shooting for a very laid-back atmosphere where we hope on our reclaimed, locally-made picnic tables you could find a student beside a construction worker beside a professor beside a stay-at-home mom,” Bowers said.

Sundays at Kidzu to be admission-free

Though Kidzu Children’s Museum will soon move out of downtown, it remains committed to accessibility for local families.

As of this month, families visiting Kidzu on Sundays will get to pick their own cost of admission.
Kidzu has introduced “Pay What You Can Sundays,” where no admission fee will be required for entry. Staff are still asking for donations from those who can afford them.

In a press release, Kidzu’s executive director, Pam Wall, said the new payment option fits the museum’s mission.

“Part of Kidzu’s mission is to serve children and families of our community and region, especially children and families in need,” Wall wrote. “We chose Sunday because it is the most likely day of the week that working families can come to the museum together.”

The shift to admission-free Sundays comes just a couple of months before a planned move out of University Square.

Kidzu will be moving to University Mall in September, right when local students are going back to school, said Tina Clossick, director of operations and programming.

“We’re going to spend that time setting up the site and we’ll stay open at our location in University Square through the summer,” Clossick said.

The museum will move to its permanent location atop Wallace Plaza in 2016.

“We’re building on top of a deck which makes things a little more difficult, but we’re getting everything in line and it looks like it’s all going to work out,” Clossick said.