Just a few years after opening its first location in Florida, White Castle has announced plans to open a second location in the state just south of Marion County.
On Sunday, Leesburg-News.com reported that White Castle will build a new restaurant in Clermont.
The company also has plans to expand further into Central Florida with another restaurant in the Orlando area.
The announcement comes three years after White Castle opened its first restaurant in Orlando at 11595 Daryl Carter Parkway. A year after that location opened, it was named the top-performing White Castle in the United States.
The Orlando restaurant was the first White Castle in operation in Florida since the 1960s, when the chain ran a location in Miami.
A year and a half after that Orlando location opened, White Castle opened a Crave & Go takeout location near that restaurant. The Crave & Go facility strictly serves pickup and delivery services.
The two locations in Orlando are the only White Castle locations in the state of Florida.
Clermont, which is around 40 miles south of Marion County, also recently saw the addition of another chain from the Midwest when Portillo’s opened a location in the city at the beginning of this year.
White Castle was founded in Kansas in 1921 and currently operates around 350 locations across 13 states. The restaurant chain has its largest collection of locations in the Midwest and Northeast.
Outside of Florida, the only other state in the Southeast with a White Castle is Tennessee.
The new restaurant in Clermont will be the closest that White Castle has ever been to Marion County, putting residents around an hour’s drive from the popular sliders.
For those less inclined to drive, Marion County recently saw the addition of another, similar slider chain earlier this year. In September, Smalls Sliders opened its first location in Ocala along State Road 200.
That new restaurant is just a couple of miles down the roadway from where Krystal’s used to operate its sole Ocala slider restaurant, which closed at the end of 2019.
Will you make the trip to Clermont to try the new White Castle when it opens? Would you like to see White Castle build a restaurant in Marion County? Share your thoughts in a comment below or a letter to the editor.
