Article Excerpt:
TWST: Would you begin with a brief historical sketch of Grill Concepts and a picture of things as they are now?Mr. Spivak: We are 21 years old. We opened our first restaurant in Beverly Hills on January 31, 1984, under the name of The Grill. You enter off the mouth of an alley and the restaurant ultimately became known as Grill on the Alley. It's within walking distance to William Morris, which is the largest talent agency in the world. So almost from the day we opened, we were frequented by all of their agents, and the restaurant started to take on a real Hollywood cachet with all of the agents entertaining all of their clients. And actually to this day, there hasn't been a person nominated for an Academy Award, Best Actor or Actress who hasn't eaten at The Grill. We are a very traditional American grill featuring prime steaks, chops and fresh seafood. The restaurant was inducted into the Nation's Restaurant News Fine Dining Hall of Fame in 1995 as a member of the distinguished restaurants of North America. And Vanity Fair, in April of last year, said it was one of the five most powerful restaurants in the country. From that, we leveraged our success and in 1988 we opened up a restaurant by the name of Daily Grill. The Daily Grill is a downscale version of The Grill, still a traditional American grill featuring steaks, chops, fresh seafood for dinner and a lot of salads and sandwiches at lunch. To give you kind of a brief picture of the difference between The Grill and the Daily Grill, The Grill has a check average of about $25 for lunch and $60 for dinner, while the Daily Grill's check average for lunch is $14 and dinner runs around $25. The big differences are that at The Grill, we use all prime meats, whereas at the Daily Grill, our steaks are certified Angus or genuine Angus. And at The Grill, the level of service is much higher, using two servers for every five tables, while at the Daily Grill, we use one server for every five tables. We expanded the Daily Grill to the point where currently there are 20 Daily Grills throughout the United States, and we have opened up three additional The Grills, for a total of four. In about 1995, we opened up The Grill in a hotel, the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. That led us into a new area of expansion, opening up restaurants and hotels. Typically the hotel puts up all the capital to remodel their restaurant to our specifications, we license the hotel to operate under our brand, and then we take a management contract and we run that restaurant for them. We don't have the hotels run our restaurants; we run them with this management contract. This enabled the company to grow a little faster without the intense capital that it takes to open up restaurants since the hotels are putting up all the capital. Of those 24 restaurants that I mentioned, nine of them currently are in hotels. We have three Starwood Hotels, two Hiltons, one Hyatt, one Fairmont and a couple of independent brands. That's kind of a brief overview of where we are.
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