While visiting Paris about 15 years ago, restaurateur Mark Bucher came across an unusual restaurant. There was only one thing on the menu: steak frites. It had no wine list—just the option of red or white, served by the bottle. The staff was rude and the food was expensive. And the place was packed.
Bucher thought the restaurant must be onto something. A few years later, he and entrepreneur Tom Gregg opened their own take on the concept in Washington, D.C. Like its Parisian counterpart, Medium Rare served steak and fries with a secret sauce, plus salad and bread, for a flat rate of $19.50. It also offered a small beer and wine selection and dessert. It was open for dinner, and brunch on weekends. It, too, was usually packed.
The concept flew in the face of the conventional restaurant wisdom that consumers want variety. Instead, Bucher believed, if you served a few great items at a great value, guests would come back for the same thing again and again. The narrow focus would also be good for the bottom line and help keep prices in check.
The business model has proven prescient. As restaurants scale back menus and simplify operations to combat rising costs, the industry is starting to look a bit more like Medium Rare. But few if any have taken the strategy to such extreme lengths.
(In another odd stroke of foresight, the steak Medium Rare serves—ribeye cap—was considered a tossaway when the restaurant opened. Now it’s one of the most popular and expensive cuts, Bucher said.)
Back in 2011, Bucher had no doubt the concept would work. Landlords weren’t so sure. They couldn’t believe that Medium Rare didn’t serve lunch, chicken or salmon. Frustrated and looking to prove a point, Bucher asked a leasing agent to name his favorite Thai restaurant. “Crystal Thai in Arlington,” he responded—he loved their pad thai and ordered it every time. “That’s what we’re gonna be,” Bucher said.
Twelve years later, Medium Rare has defied those early skeptics. It has grown to four locations, with a fifth opening in Baltimore this week and two more in the pipeline. Its relatively small restaurants generate average unit volumes of $3 million to $4 million a year serving virtually one dish. And landlords have seen the light: They’re now willing to finance Medium Rare’s buildouts in exchange for a share of the profits.
The success has validated Medium Rare’s philosophy: “Be really good at a few things instead of being marginally good at a lot of things,” Bucher said.
It sounds simple, but he insists it’s actually a very difficult business model because of the discipline required. Most people open restaurants as a creative outlet, he said, but there’s little room for that at Medium Rare. “We don’t change, we don’t add, we don’t do specials, we don’t do anything,” Bucher said. “It’s boring.”
But it works. When staff balk at the rigidity, Bucher asks them, “Do you want to be famous, or do you want to be rich?”
Medium Rare's restaurants are small, but a simple menu allows it to turn tables quickly. | Photo courtesy of Medium Rare
Bucher’s restaurant career began in 1993, when he was a director of real estate for Dunkin Donuts. He went on to found two concepts, Medium Rare and BGR: The Burger Joint, and spend several years as a “Restaurant Nightmares”-style consultant to floundering restaurants. He currently sits on the board of the National Restaurant Association.
He has seen enough over the years to conclude that the traditional restaurant business model is broken. He pointed to restaurants’ high failure rate, which has only been exacerbated by the pandemic and its aftermath. “I think we can all sit back and say the restaurant model as executed in this country has never worked,” he said.
With Medium Rare, he has tried to fix it by attacking restaurants’ three biggest costs: food, labor and rent. The concept’s limited menu helps keep food costs down and requires fewer workers to execute. But it pays those workers well, which has helped reduce turnover: Many of Medium Rare’s managers have been with the chain since day one.
“There’s not a labor problem, there’s a wage problem,” Bucher said. “If you just pay people what they need to make to have a career they want, not need, you’ve got it.”
It also keeps its restaurants small—around 3,000 square feet—to help control occupancy costs and make them easier to fill.
Nonetheless, like everyone else, Medium Rare has had to raise prices recently. But at $28.95, its prix fixe meal remains a bargain. That is the other part of the equation at Medium Rare: Besides cutting costs, “you have to deliver really great, high-quality food at a price that’s almost not believable,” Bucher said.
The restaurateur originally thought Medium Rare’s first location would be its last—another institution in a city full of them. But the response from customers led it down a different path. It grew locally at first, to Arlington, Va., and Bethesda, Md., and is now in New Orleans and headed for Houston. Bucher said he wants to open 20 Medium Rares—one in every city with an NFL team.
“We don’t have to spend money to figure out what cities work,” he said. “The NFL took care of that for us.” He was in Detroit on Thursday and headed to Green Bay to scout locations.
At the same time, Bucher doesn’t want Medium Rare to feel like a chain, but rather a series of local businesses that are ingrained in their communities. To that end, Medium Rare works with Feed the Fridge, a charity Bucher founded that pays restaurants to stock fridges around the city with meals for those in need.
“If you’re gonna serve a community these days, you have to be part of a community,” he said.