Shake Shack, the New York-based burger chain, is coming to the Gulf Coast with a new location at Tanger Outlets Foley. According to Visit Foley and a press release from Tanger, the restaurant will anchor a new food and beverage district as part of the outlet mall’s ongoing transformation — the most visible sign yet of a renovation meant to turn a shopping stop into a dining and gathering destination.
Construction began earlier this year to update the more than 500,000-square-foot property, which will include roughly 20,000 square feet of experiential food, beverage and entertainment space with room for up to eight dining concepts, including Shake Shack. Tanger, a national owner and operator of outlet and open-air shopping centers, said the renovation aims to modernize the shopping experience while preserving the center’s coastal character. The renovation is also expected to add patios, a walkable dining zone, and gathering spaces designed for both daytime and nighttime social outings, according to the Visit Foley release.
“Across our portfolio, we have been very intentional about introducing fresh, elevated food, beverage, and entertainment concepts that create an immersive, repeat-visit environment for our guests,” said Justin Stein, Tanger’s executive vice president and chief revenue officer. “That strategy is evident in the approach we’ve taken to renovate and remerchandise Tanger Foley, where we’re curating an optimal mix of in-demand retail and dining brands that will reinvent the on-site experience for the center’s tourist and local audiences.”
“We’re thrilled to welcome Shake Shack to Tanger Foley, initiating a new, experience-focused approach to dining at this center,” said Hugo Gilbert, Tanger’s senior director of leasing for restaurants and entertainment. Tanger said it is actively seeking additional distinctive, experience-driven restaurant operators to complement the center’s evolving retail and dining mix.
What the renovation changes
The 20,000-square-foot food court is the centerpiece of the physical transformation, consolidating eight dining options into a single destination within the property. For shoppers accustomed to leaving the outlets for meals, the food court is designed to keep the visit — and the spending — on site. For the restaurants, it offers the foot traffic of a mall that draws visitors from across the Gulf Coast.
The patios, walkable dining zone and gathering spaces extend the concept beyond a conventional food court. Tanger’s design language — “immersive, repeat-visit environment,” in Stein’s words — describes an outdoor-oriented layout suited to the Gulf Coast climate, where evenings from fall through spring draw crowds outdoors and where a shopping center can function as a town square for a community that lacks one.
The distinction between “tourist and local audiences” in Tanger’s framing captures Foley’s unusual position. The city sits inland from the beach communities of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach, along the corridor that funnel beach traffic to and from Interstate 65 and beyond. Tanger Outlets has long served both markets: vacationers making the outlet run on the way to or from the beach, and the growing year-round population of south Baldwin County. A food-and-gathering destination serves both, and extends the hours in which the property earns them.
Why Shake Shack matters to the mix
The new location will be Shake Shack’s second in Alabama and the first in the greater Gulf South market, serving the menu that built the brand: made-to-order 100% Angus beef burgers, crinkle-cut fries, frozen custard and milkshakes. The chain grew out of New York’s Madison Square Park, where a single hot dog cart expanded into a permanent kiosk and then into one of the most recognizable names in what the industry calls “fine casual” — fast service with ingredient quality positioned above typical fast food.
For Tanger, landing a brand of Shake Shack’s profile is a statement about the caliber of tenant the renovation is meant to attract. Restaurant chains of that tier evaluate markets carefully, weighing tourism traffic, local demographics and the quality of the surrounding retail environment. A Foley location joining only the second in the state signals that the company sees the Baldwin County market — and the outlet center’s visitor base — as comparable to the state’s larger metros.
For local diners, the practical effect is straightforward: a nationally known burger option at the outlets, inside a food court designed to offer eight choices in one stop. And for Foley’s broader effort to build its own identity as a destination rather than a pass-through, each major tenant announcement adds to the case that the city — not just the beach — is where the Gulf Coast’s retail and dining growth is happening.
Foley’s rise as a retail destination
Tanger Outlets Foley has anchored the city’s retail economy since it opened, drawing shoppers from Mobile, Pensacola and the beach communities, and its 500,000 square feet of retail space makes it one of the largest shopping destinations on the central Gulf Coast. The center’s location along the beach-access corridor is its defining asset: for decades, the outlet run has been woven into the Gulf Coast vacation routine, with families stopping in Foley on the drive to or from the sand.
But retail has changed around the center. Shopping centers across the country have spent the past decade reinventing themselves as experience destinations — adding dining, entertainment and outdoor gathering space as online commerce absorbed routine purchases. Tanger’s renovation strategy, described in Stein’s comments about “fresh, elevated food, beverage, and entertainment concepts,” is the national playbook applied to Foley, and the food court with Shake Shack is its most concrete expression.
Visit Foley’s role in publicizing the project reflects how the city views the renovation. Foley has invested heavily in its own identity — a downtown revitalization, the Foley Sports Tourism complex, and attractions that give visitors reasons to stay rather than pass through. A transformed Tanger property with destination dining fits directly into that strategy, extending the time and money visitors spend inside the city limits.
What eight dining options and a patio change
The arithmetic of the food court explains its importance. Eight dining options in one 20,000-square-foot space means groups with different tastes can eat together, families can split decisions without leaving the property, and a shopping trip can stretch naturally across a meal. Food courts also generate traffic during hours that retail alone does not — the dinner crowd that arrives after the workday, the evening visitors drawn by patios and gathering spaces designed for “daytime and nighttime social outings.”
The patios and walkable dining zone are the elements most tailored to the Gulf Coast. Outdoor dining works here for most of the year, and the coastal instinct is to eat outside — a reality that beach-town developments have long monetized and that inland Baldwin County developments have increasingly copied. A shopping center that offers walkable outdoor dining effectively borrows the atmosphere of the beach towns while remaining on the interstate corridor.
For Tanger, the repeat-visit goal in Stein’s statement is the business case in two words. A tourist audience arrives once or twice a season; a local audience decides every week whether the center is worth the trip. Dining and gathering space is what converts the center from a seasonal shopping errand into a routine destination, and every element of the renovation — the food court, the patios, the curated mix of brands — is built to earn that second and third visit.
The second Alabama location
Shake Shack’s decision to open only its second Alabama location at Tanger Foley underscores the market’s drawing power. The chain’s site selection has historically favored high-traffic, high-visibility locations in strong retail environments, and its expansion beyond its first Alabama site into Baldwin County tracks the county’s explosive residential growth — among the fastest in Alabama — and its enormous tourism economy.
The menu that arrives with it is the brand’s familiar one: beef burgers, crinkle-cut fries and milkshakes, served in a fast-casual format that has made Shake Shack a fixture of premium shopping centers and tourist districts across the country. At Tanger Foley, it becomes the anchor of an eight-restaurant food court inside a 500,000-square-foot property that is remaking itself into something more than a place to shop — a place, in the language of the renovation, to gather.
The economics of an outlet renovation
Renovations of this scale are bets on visitor behavior. A 500,000-square-foot property does not add a 20,000-square-foot food court, patios and gathering spaces on a whim; the investment assumes that dining and atmosphere will extend visits, increase spending per trip and justify premium rents from the dining and retail brands the center can now attract. Stein’s description of “curating an optimal mix of in-demand retail and dining brands” describes that strategy from the leasing side — the renovation creates the environment that makes top-tier tenants possible, and the tenants give the renovation its traffic.
The tourist-local dual audience is what makes the Foley bet unusually well protected. Even if local visitation patterns shifted, the beach tourism economy guarantees a baseline of millions of visitors passing within sight of the property every year; even in a weak hurricane season, the year-round population growth of southern Baldwin County supplies a local base that most tourist-market retailers can only envy. Few retail properties on the Gulf Coast can draw on both streams at once.
The timing of the construction — begun earlier this year, with the transformation unfolding across the property — also positions the center to capture the full cycle of Gulf Coast seasons: spring break traffic, summer vacation crowds, the fall event calendar that Baldwin County has built around sports tourism, and the winter months when snowbird visitors sustain the coast’s off-season economy.
What it means for Foley residents
For the people who live in and around Foley, the renovation’s significance is closer to home. A major dining destination at the outlets means fewer trips to Gulf Shores, Spanish Fort or Pensacola for a night out, and a gathering place that belongs to the community rather than the tourist strip. City leaders have spent years working to give Foley a downtown and public spaces of its own; a transformed Tanger adds private-sector gathering space to that effort.
The project also feeds the local employment base.Outlet centers of this scale are among the largest private employers in south Baldwin County, and a food court with eight new dining operations — plus the patios and gathering spaces that require staffing — adds jobs in exactly the service sector where the coastal economy creates them. For young workers, students and seasonal employees, the expanded property broadens the options close to home.
And for the Gulf Coast’s dining scene, Shake Shack’s arrival at the outlets is another marker of how far the region has come. National “fine casual” brands that once skipped south Alabama now treat Baldwin County as an obvious market, a shift driven by the county’s growth numbers and by tourist volumes that rival much larger metro areas. The second Alabama Shake Shack landing in Foley — not Mobile, not Huntsville — is the clearest possible statement of where that demand is seen to be.
Looking ahead to opening
Construction on the transformation is underway, with the food court and its eight dining options — Shake Shack among them — forming the heart of the redesigned property. When the patios, walkable dining zone and gathering spaces open alongside it, Tanger Outlets Foley will have completed its shift from a shopping center that happened to have food options into a destination built equally for shopping, dining and simply spending an evening. For Tanger, for Foley and for the shoppers and travelers of the central Gulf Coast, that is the reinvention Stein described — arriving one restaurant at a time.
