Spokane restaurateurs Mike and Cheryl Didier plan to open a secondand even largerProspectors Bar & Grill, the big West Plains restaurant that opened last spring.


The couples company, Prospectors Inc., has agreed to lease a planned restaurant building that Wandermere Investments LLC, of Spokane, will build in the Wandermere West development, at the southwest corner of U.S. 395 and Farwell Road, just north of Spokane.


Spokane developer Dick Vandervert is the managing partner of Wandermere Investments, and the construction company of which he is president, Vandervert Construction Inc., plans to start work on the structure later this month. Mike Didier says the building is expected to be completed late this spring, and he hopes to open the restaurant in late June.


For a restaurant, the building will be huge, Didier says. It will include about 12,000 square feet of floor space and seating capacity for 342.


By comparison, the first Prospectors, which opened in May 2003 at the Pacific Northwest Technology Park, on the West Plains, includes 8,600 square feet of floor space and seats 299 people.


The Wandermere restaurant will include a banquet facility that will be able to accommodate up to 75 people, which is included in the eaterys total seating capacity. When that facility isnt being used, however, it will serve as overflow seating when the rest of the restaurant is full, Didier says.


Didier declines to disclose the cost of the new building. The first Prospectors cost about $2 million to develop, according to estimates at the time by Vandervert Construction.


The new restaurant will employ 140 people, and the executive chef at the West Plains Prospectors, Alexa Wilson, will move to the new establishment. About 130 people work at the West Plains Prospectors.


Cheryl Didier says the menu at the new restaurant will be the same as the menu at the West Plains establishment, but the dcor will be slightly differentmore of a lodge feel than the mining theme of the first one.


Russell C. Page Architects PS, of Spokane, designed the restaurant.