On the edge of downtown Bentonville, a new locally-owned sandwich shop is quickly gaining notoriety for being the latest hip hangout in the city’s ever-growing food and cycling scene.

Archie’s Sandwichery, located at 280 N. Walton Boulevard, opened in June to instant crowds. Founded by Bentonville resident Kevin Girkins, with help from a crew of local friends, the restaurant swiftly drew attention — and felt the pressure just as fast.

Quick to acknowledge some fumbling during its first weeks in business, Girkins and his team had to pivot fast, adjusting staffing levels, paring down the menu, and reworking operations to keep up with demand and deliver the experience they’d envisioned. 

“It's always a moving target for success on these kinds of things,” Girkins said. “And I think just knowing that to begin with is very helpful, having run a restaurant before. … Not every day is going to be perfect.”

By 5 p.m. on a sunny July afternoon, the patio at Archie’s had filled up, with one long table hosting a small crowd of animated friends sipping adult beverages. Several customers stopped to give the restaurant’s four-legged namesake, Archer, a friendly scratch along the way.

Girkins adopted the coonhound/beagle mix as a puppy after he had been abandoned outside of a dog park. While mulling over names for his sandwich shop, he told his friends his backup would be to name it after his dog. It was the one that stuck.

Archie’s joins the trend to appeal to Bentonville’s biker community with its location — riding distance to Coler Mountain Bike Preserve and minutes from downtown — large outdoor patio, and drink menu. And it’s not just a marketing ploy, Girkins has strong ties to the Bentonville biking community himself. 

An avid cyclist and former bike racer, Girkins got his start in the bike industry at 18. By 30, he had joined The Meteor’s bike shop in Austin — a move that eventually brought him to Northwest Arkansas to help launch the company’s Bentonville location.

Maria Franciscovich, a Bentonville resident who was taking the afternoon to enjoy Archie’s patio with a book, said she felt Archie’s already had a great vibe even after only being open for a month and attributes its success to Girkin.

“The Meteor is really cool, right? He’s the one that made it cool,” she said.

Drawing on his management experience at The Meteor and Bentoville, along with a six-year stint at a sandwich shop in Austin, Texas, Girkins set out to bring Archie’s to life — aiming to fill a niche he felt was missing in the local restaurant scene. His vision doesn’t stop at one location; he hopes to expand to five across the region over the next decade.

While it’s competing with plenty of other fast-casual lunch destinations along Walton Boulevard, Archie’s goes beyond a simple sandwich, incorporating into its menu trendy Japanese and Korean chips, beer, wine and cocktails, and even a caviar plate complete with crème fraîche, Ruffles and a martini on the side.

“The idea is … how do we class up the place while still keeping it in the trailer park,” Girkins said when describing the caviar plate. “And it’s 40 bucks — we don’t make any money off of it.”

While the cocktail menu is strategically curated due to space, Girkins plans to expand on the martini offerings in the near future.

“Soon, we will have it be a martini themed bar with five or more martinis such as ‘pepperoncini-tini,’ ‘tomato-tini,’ ‘pickle-tini’ and more,” he said. 

The menu at Archie’s implements local ingredients whenever possible, using Ozarks Natural Breads, Sandi Sue's Gluten Free Bakery ciabatta, and Springdale-based Bartleby's Food plant-based proteins.

“Whether or not we want to be considered competitors with Chick-fil-A and McDonald's and Taco Bell, we are right next to it, and we have a fast-casual model as well,” Girkins said. “I think that the professionalism and the efficiency that we exude as a company needs to be tangible, but it also needs to be tangibly local, so that we can differentiate.”

While one of his core beliefs is creating value for the customer with his prices, he also prioritizes his staff. He calls his general manager, Alex Leinen, the shop’s “hero,” and raves over his 17-year-old lead employee Anika Grube, who he jokes is secretly a 25-year-old reporter scouting out the business.

“The best form of hospitality with management starts with your own staff, so they can then give that hospitality to the customer,” he said. “There's no way I can make sandwiches and run a business without staff. I've gotta take care of them first.”

Archie’s will be hosting a party on July 19 from 4 p.m. to close with food, a DJ and more. Proceeds will benefit a Bentonville Brewing employee who was injured in a car wreck.