For years, the joke around Huntington was that if you wanted a Quarter Pounder, you budgeted half an hour for the errand. The nearest McDonald's sat ten miles up US Highway 69 in Lufkin, and depending on who you asked, that meant a twenty-minute drive each way or the better part of an hour once you counted the drive-thru line and the trip back. Either way, fast food in Huntington meant leaving Huntington.
That changed this summer. And if you've been hearing that Huntington is getting not one but two new restaurants, you're not wrong, but you're also not getting the full picture. One of those restaurants is open. The other is still, as of this week, nowhere to be found on the company's own website.
The McDonald's Took Nineteen Months, Not Four
When word first broke in December 2024 that McDonald's was coming to 775 US Highway 69, the timeline sounded almost too easy. Filings with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation projected a start date of March 3, 2025, and a completion date of July 9, 2025, a four-month build for a new, ground-up restaurant with a dual-lane drive-thru.
That's not how it went. By June 2025, city administrator Bill Stewart was telling local reporters that the start date had actually slipped to June 1, three months past the original plan, with no clear explanation for the delay. The state's own project record eventually listed a revised completion date of November 9, 2025. Even that came and went. The restaurant didn't actually open its doors until late July 2026, according to the Lufkin Daily News, which means a project first announced in December 2024 took roughly nineteen months to serve its first order of fries, not the four the original paperwork suggested.
The location, at 775 US Highway 69 next to Brookshire Brothers, was designed by a Houston firm with the stated goal of giving Huntington a restaurant that didn't feel like a copy-paste build. For a town of about 2,025 residents spread across 2.75 square miles, much of it bordered by national forest, that drive to Lufkin is now optional rather than mandatory, at least for one brand of burger.
Flayva's Own Website Doesn't Know It's Coming Yet
The second story is the one that's easy to conflate with the first, because both restaurants have been discussed at the same city council meetings and both involve the same stretch of highway.
Flayva is a Louisiana-based fast-casual chain built around Philly cheesesteaks, wings, shrimp po'boys, and milkshakes. It's genuinely growing fast. The company opened its first location in Baton Rouge on January 18, 2026, and had a second spot in Hammond, Louisiana soft-opening within weeks, along with a third location already running in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. When CEO Neil Muhaisen appeared before Huntington's city council in late March 2026 to announce the chain's first Texas location, he framed it as a natural next step for a brand still finding its footing outside Louisiana.
The plan was to move into the former Dairy Queen building along Highway 69 South, the one that had sat empty since Lonestar DQ, the franchise operator running several East Texas locations, shut those stores down in March 2025. Muhaisen's original target was mid-May 2026. That came and went. By late July, when Flayva representatives updated the city council again, the estimate had softened to "within about a month," with some city leaders privately offering a more cautious six to eight weeks given how much renovation work was still visibly unfinished.
Six weeks from that late-July update lands right around now. Eight weeks pushes into late September. And as of this week, Flayva's own locations page still lists exactly three restaurants: Baton Rouge, Hammond, and Roanoke Rapids. Huntington isn't on it yet. That's not a rumor or a delay reported secondhand. It's the company's own site, not updated to include the location it's been telling Huntington's city council about since March.
Same Highway, Different Kind of Project
It's worth asking why one project came in nineteen months late and the other is still catching up to its own six-week grace period, especially since both are food chains opening on the same road.
The difference is what each company was actually building. McDonald's built new, on a cleared lot, with its own design firm, its own contractor relationships, and a $750,000 budget filed with the state before a shovel went in the ground. New construction is expensive and slow to start, but once it's moving, the sequence is predictable: foundation, framing, equipment, inspection.
Flayva is doing something different. It's moving into a building that had already been dark for a year. Adaptive reuse projects like that carry a kind of uncertainty new construction doesn't. You don't know what the electrical or plumbing looks like until you open the walls. A shuttered fast food building that sat empty through an East Texas summer and winter can hide problems that don't show up until the crew is already inside, which tends to turn "hard and heavy" renovation weeks, the phrase Flayva's own representatives used in that July council update, into months.
That difference matters if you're a Huntington resident trying to plan around either opening: the type of project tells you more about how much to trust the timeline than the company's press release does.
What's Actually Open While You Wait
None of this means Huntington's dining options are limited to McDonald's and a promise. Sonic Drive-In has been running at 407 US-69 the whole time, and Simple Simon's Pizza has held down 461 US-69 as well. Both are a shorter walk from downtown than either of the newcomers.
What's still missing is the late-night option. Flayva's other locations run from 10:30 a.m. to 3 a.m., seven days a week, a schedule that would genuinely change what's available in Huntington after most businesses lock up for the evening. That gap is exactly why the Lufkin Daily News framed Flayva as filling a need the McDonald's opening didn't touch. Until the doors actually open, that gap stays a gap.
If You're Keeping Track
- McDonald's, 775 US Highway 69: open as of late July 2026, next to Brookshire Brothers.
- Flayva, former Dairy Queen site on Highway 69 South: still under renovation as of this writing, with the company's own site not yet listing a Huntington location.
- Sonic Drive-In, 407 US-69: open, unaffected by either project.
- Simple Simon's Pizza, 461 US-69: open, unaffected by either project.
Huntington's stretch of Highway 69 is genuinely busier than it's been in years, and one long-standing gap is already closed. The other is close enough to check on before you build a Friday night around it.
If you're watching Huntington for reasons beyond dinner plans, whether that's a home search, a land purchase, or just keeping an eye on what a growing stretch of highway means for property values nearby, Platinum Properties and Ranches tracks these towns the same way we tracked this story: closely, and with the actual dates. Reach out anytime you want a straight read on what's happening in Huntington, on the highway or off it.
