Be careful about sharing this, because there’s no telling which restaurant CEOs have already been taken. That’s the thing about pod people: They seem so normal—until they up and do something that leaves alien possession as the only explanation.
Consider the obvious victims of recent months, the industry’s textbook models of management propriety. During David Overton’s 41 years as leader of The Cheesecake Factory, the restaurant chain didn’t make a single acquisition, preferring to grow organically through Cheesecake and its other small brands—Grand Lux Cafe and RockSugar Southeast Asian Kitchen—by opening a handful of restaurants per year.
Cheesecake took about two years to hatch its latest homegrown concept, Social Monk Asian Kitchen. Then it bought Fox Restaurant Concepts, a collection of 45 establishments of all shapes and service formats. With the sweep of a pen, the company morphed into a 15-concept operation with 264 high-volume restaurants in its fold.
Whatever got into Overton likely took hold of Sandy Cochran, too. Acquisitions aren’t completely alien to her charge, the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store chain, but the company has hardly been a Tilman Fertitta, either. Cracker Barrel’s last and apparently only acquisition came in 1998 with the purchase of Logan’s Roadhouse, which it sold eight years later.
Now Cochran’s hand may be cramping from signing so many closing documents. Cracker Barrel recently became a minority stakeholder in Punch Bowl Social, an urban eatertainment concept that’s as different from Cracker Barrel as Kanye is from Willie Nelson.
Then it turned around and bought 33-unit Maple Street Biscuit Co. for $36 million. The chain is a standout brand in the fledgling market Cracker Barrel tried to crack with its homegrown Holler & Dash biscuit venture. In the time it takes to butter some grits, a longtime stick-to-your-knitting operation has become a three-brand conglomerate, even with the planned absorption of Holler & Dash into Maple Street.
It’s easy to see why leaders as deliberate as Overton and Cochran are suddenly making brash bets. Slow and steady might’ve worked fine in easier times. These are not those times. The industry has been slogging through mud for about four years now, without any rock-firm diagnosis of what’s put it in a swamp.
No wonder bold is the new moderate. Operators are trying all sorts of new approaches to common problems. Consider, for instance, what’s being done to address skyrocketing real estate costs. Pinstripes, a 10-unit food and games concept, is securing leases by onboarding real estate developers Simon Property Group and Brookfield Properties as minority owners.
Other growth chains are embracing product licensing as a way of preselling the brand in markets where a brick-and-mortar presence has yet to be established. Before the “Now open” sign goes on, consumers in the area are already familiar with the newcomer’s signature product because it’s been showcased on supermarket shelves for years. And if the retail version sells particularly well in a given area, that’s where the chain is going to open its next restaurant.
Ghost kitchens were initially embraced as a way of meeting the sharp upswing in demand for delivery. Restaurants already huffing and puffing to meet the demand for on-premise meals at lunch or dinner were suddenly beset with a double-digit increase in orders from the off-premise boom.
Now, real estate concerns are becoming a prime driver. Why pay to build a full-scale restaurant when you can rent a kitchen space for a fraction of the cost and sell food exclusively for delivery?
If invaders from outer space are looking for minds to occupy, they’ll find ideal hosts in restaurant executives striving to think differently. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that Overton and Cochran made their moves almost simultaneous with Storm Area 51, the supposed Nevada meet-and-greet in late September between humans and extraterrestrials.
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