Mr. Motenko: BJ's Restaurants, which is our main concept, started in 1978 in Orange County, California. From 1978 through 1991, several small BJ's restaurants were opened primarily in beach communities of Southern California. At that time, the menu consisted almost exclusively of deep- dish, Chicago-style pizza. The restaurants were very popular and highly regarded. In 1991 Jerry Hennessy and I got involved. We were both CPAs in our prior lives and had BJ's as a client. The opportunity arose in 1991 to take over operating the company. We took this opportunity and operated the BJ's Restaurants from 1991 through 1995. During that period, we realized that we needed to expand the concept in order to remain competitive. In order to do so we had to purchase the company from its founders, which we did in 1995. That's when we embarked on a program to significantly enhance the BJ's concept. We brought in the microbrewery aspect of the concept in 1996 when we opened our first brewery restaurant in Brea, California, a 10,000 square-foot restaurant. In addition, we brought the menu from basically just pizza to where it is today, with over 100 items. The original restaurants were very small, averaging around 2,500 square feet. Although we still successfully operate the original restaurants, the newer restaurants are much bigger, at 7,000 to 12,000 square feet. They have been very successful, averaging about 500 a square foot in annual sales. The breweries are at capacity, distributing beer to all our restaurants, and we're on a pretty rapid growth pattern right now. In anticipation of going public in 1996, we added mass to the company by purchasing a restaurant chain in the Pacific Northwest called Pietro's. The idea was to convert the Pietro's restaurants to BJ's Restaurants, and we did convert some of them. But we were having such huge successes in Southern California and in our other markets with the bigger restaurants that we decided to halt the conversion of the Pietro's restaurants and focus our resources on the new restaurants. So in the Northwest we still operate some BJ's Restaurants and some Pietro's restaurants, but the focus of the company at this point is on the 7,000-12,000 square-foot Brewery and Brewhouse restaurants.
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