March 6, 2020

The Banquet will serve its first meals Monday night at its new building on the west side of Sioux Falls.

“We’re excited,” said Andrew Hewitt, director of development and marketing for the volunteer-based feeding ministry. “This has been in our dreams for a long time, and it’s now becoming a reality. We’re excited to serve people in that pocket of the city.”

The Banquet West at Fifth Street and Marion Road will have an open house from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. today. Koch Hazard Architects designed the building, and Jans Corp. served as the general contractor. The land was donated by the Delbridge family.

The Banquet, which has been serving meals in downtown Sioux Falls for 35 years, saw the need for access to food on the west side, Hewitt said. In 2015, it began serving dinner twice a week from a building at the W.H. Lyons Fairgrounds, transporting meals there from The Banquet at Eighth Street and Indiana Avenue. The nonprofit organization began a $1.6 million fundraising campaign for a permanent second location in 2018.

The Banquet West has its own kitchen and will serve dinner every weeknight.

“The dining room is designed to hold 150 at a time, and we’ll serve from 6 to 7:30 p.m., so it will turn over quite a bit,” Hewitt said. “We’re anticipating a couple of hundred meals will be served every night.”

With a second location, additional help is needed to provide, prepare and serve meals, Hewitt said.

“We’re putting out a call of action to volunteer groups to serve the meals,” he said. “We’re going from 13 meals a week to 16 a week.”

In addition to dinner, The Banquet serves breakfast every weekday and a Saturday lunch at its main location. Last year, it served almost 200,000 meals.

This article has been updated with photos The Banquet provided from the open house.