The owners of the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant on Spokanes North Side plan to build a $3.7 million outlet of the pizza chain in Spokane Valley and open it this fall.


The new outlet will occupy a 12,400-square-foot building on a two-acre site at 14919 E. Sprague, says Sam Thompson, one of the owners.


Thompson Family Investments SV LLC will own the land and building, and will lease them to a newly formed company, Topsa Pizza SV Inc., which will operate the restaurant, Thompson says. He says he and his son and daughter-in-law, Mike and Linda Thompson, own both companies. They also own the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant at 10007 N. Nevada, behind the Northpointe Plaza shopping center. They built that restaurant about eight years ago, moving it there from Shadle Center.


C.T. Chang & Associates, of Bedford, Texas, designed the planned restaurant building in the Valley, and the Thompsons are seeking construction bids. Sam Thompson says they hope to open the restaurant Oct. 1. It will be about 1,000 square feet larger than the North Side restaurant, will have seating for about 440 people, and probably will employ about 60 people, mostly part time, he says.


Chuck E. Cheese restaurants, which are geared heavily toward families, offer pizza, a salad bar, appetizers, and desserts, plus numerous games, rides, arcade-style activities, and musical and comic entertainment by computer-controlled robotic characters. Thompson says the Valley restaurant will have more games and rides than the North Side restaurant because of its larger size.


He says he has wanted to open a second Chuck E. Cheese restaurant here for a long time, but was unable to do so until now because CEC Entertainment Inc., the Irving, Texas-company that operates the Chuck E. Cheese chain, went through an extended period of opening only company-owned outlets and acquiring franchisee-owned restaurants. The chain now includes about 545 outlets in all, and CEC owns about 500 of them, Thompson says.