BoothEconomy · July 7, 2026
Chick-fil-A has opened a temporary lunch counter in the lobby of Jax Tower at 50 North in downtown Jacksonville, using the pop-up to gauge demand for a future full-service restaurant before committing to a permanent lease, according to News4JAX and the Jacksonville Daily Record. The counter, occupying a former Ground Level Coffee space at 50 N. Laura St., is serving a limited menu from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., Monday through Friday, from July 6 through August.
Building management notified tenants of the arrangement by email: “While this is a temporary arrangement, Chick-fil-A is using this opportunity to test both the downtown market and our building as a potential location for a future full-time, full-service restaurant.” Sandwiches reportedly sold out on opening day, and the chain is weighing whether to add breakfast service based on early customer requests. The 42-story tower — formerly Bank of America Tower, rebranded as Jax Tower at 50 North in June 2026 — has been actively courting retail and food tenants as its owners work to reposition the property and lift daytime foot traffic among office workers. Chick-fil-A already operates more than two dozen locations in the greater Jacksonville area and has run a comparable pop-up test in downtown Kansas City to evaluate a permanent site there.
Coverage of the pop-up varies slightly on the building’s name: News4JAX and the Daily Record use the new “Jax Tower” branding adopted after the June rebrand, while some business-press coverage still refers to it by its longtime name, Bank of America Tower — a holdover from before the property’s mid-2026 repositioning. Both refer to the same 50 N. Laura St. address.
Why it matters: This is market-entry-by-pop-up in its purest B2B form — a chain with more than two dozen locations already in the metro area declining to sign a permanent downtown lease until it has real foot-traffic data. The eight-week runway lets Chick-fil-A price the risk of a full-service build-out against actual office-worker lunch demand, while a repositioning landlord gets a proof-of-concept tenant and a sold-out opening day to show prospective permanent retailers. It’s the same temporary-footprint logic that governs a farmers market vendor testing a new corner before signing a storefront lease — just executed at national-chain scale.
Source: Chick-fil-A coming to Downtown Jacksonville? What we know about a temporary pop-up in Jax Tower — News4JAX
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