TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/022089/02208900.046

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.8 KB | 137 lines

                                                                                FOOD, Page 108

Dinner's on the Drawing Board


Ambitious pilot restaurants test new themes for the chains of
the future

By Mimi Sheraton


    The continuing success of chain restaurants inspires ever
new concepts for the gastronomic future. But what kind of
chains do today's customers want? That depends not only on what
they like to eat but also on how they like to live. Which of
the following will be for you?

    If you cherish the voice with the have-a-nice-day smile and
sunny, all's-right-with-the-world interiors, and if you can
spend only about $4 to $9 for a nice sit-down family lunch or
dinner, Allie's may be the chain to watch for. With the
Marriott Corp. about to roll out 445 across the country and
3,000 planned by 1995, finding one should be no trick at all.

    If you are young and striving but currently impecunious; if
you buy clothes at Benetton and the Gap and like your eat-in,
take-out fast food cheap, light and stylish; and if you love
decorative $2.99-to-$3.99 sandwiches so much you're willing to
forgo the d, then San'wiches may be for you, though
expectations are that it will take five years before the planned
500 are cloned nationwide.

    More upscale in taste and budget? Do you search for designer
knockoffs and value the Liz Claiborne-Cable Car look? Do a $10
lunch and a $14 dinner (including a glass of wine) sound good
as long as you get trendy food in a slick grill-bistro setting?
Then hope that within the next two or three years yours is one
of the ten or twelve cities that will get the Daily Grill,
created by the management that owns the pricey Grill in Beverly
Hills.

    Right now, all these are among the half a dozen or so eating
concepts being tested in pilot restaurants around the country
in the hope that they will grow up to be the new-age McDonald's,
Bob's Big Boys or Howard Johnsons. Such national restaurant
chains are made, not born. Dreamed up by corporate
entrepreneurs, they are produced by high-priced, savvy market
researchers, advertising gurus, graphic designers and
architects -- as well as by food consultants who cook up
portion-controlled, idiot-proof recipes to feed the projected
image. Owing more to McLuhan than to Escoffier, their packages
are the products. Success lies in creating extraordinary images
for ordinary favorites: hamburgers, fried fish or chicken,
pizza, pasta, tacos and salads.

    "With fast food, it's all in the condiments," says Michael
Whiteman with oracular solemnity. Whiteman and his partner,
Joseph Baum, are the New York City restaurant consultants
working on San'wiches. "There's nothing unusual about a
hamburger," says Whiteman. "It's the trimmings used by
McDonald's and Burger King that make it memorable."

    Explaining the marketing strategy behind new chains, Jay
Chiat, San'wiches main backer and the superstar executive of the
imagemaking advertising agency Chiat/Day, insists that "it's all
a matter of the ADI." That is no palate-tingling condiment, but
rather the area of dominant influence, or the geographical area
that a TV station predominantly reaches (and thus the potential
audience for each commercial). That is why, for example,
Marriott since June has opened 14 branches of Allie's in San
Diego (where San'wiches is also being tested). Only after such
saturation will Chairman J.W. Marriott Jr. convert more of his
Bob's Big Boys, as well as Wag's and Howard Johnsons, to the new
theme.

    Of the three aborning chains, the riskiest appears to be
San'wiches, which is a tiny pilot on the edge of a dusty highway
in a small shopping center. What Chiat and his associates seem
to be betting on is that there is a mass market of low-income,
style-conscious people who have grasped the hip message that
less is more. The effort is averaging about 95 customers a day,
far from enough to make it profitable but up to expectations at
this point.

    What they get when they step inside this boxy eatery is a
pseudonaive, kindergarten-like decor created by California's
maverick architect Frank Gehry. But customers would be wise to
keep their eyes on the ball, for ingredients in five sandwiches
sampled were coldly, tastelessly bland. The "Veg'wich" with its
crunchy mixture proved far better than "Splash," a meager
seafood salad with tough, small shrimp and fake crab meat. As
for "New York New York," a deli takeoff of wet, shiny corned
beef and pastrami and waxy "Swiss" cheese, the Big Apple should
sue for defamation of image.

    Walk into the low, freestanding, adobe-colored brick ranch
house that is Allie's, and you're in an all-American
fantasyland. Each Allie's has a big buffet where
eat-all-you-want breakfasts and Allie's "Build-a-Lunch" ($5.49)
are laid out. The lunch selection consists mostly of fruit,
vegetable and pasta salads, with a few hot pasta and taco
choices. The printed menu reflects every currently simmering
trend, from Tex-Mex fajitas to "Better-than-Mom's Meatloaf," a
thick, pasty slice of meat loaf topped with a sour-sweet tomato
sauce. Best bets are the egg dishes and the simpler sandwiches.

    Although more fashionable, the Daily Grill follows much the
same all-things-to-all-people menu format as Allie's, albeit
with an upper-crust presentation. What nails the audience is
the slick white-and-black dining room with an open "exhibition"
kitchen that sits in Los Angeles' Brentwood Gardens shopping
mall. Partner Bob Spivak confesses that a few mistakes were
made, including a misguided oyster bar that cost $50,000 to
build and remove. Such errors will not be repeated in the next
two California outposts, one proposed for Marina del Rey, the
other for West Hollywood.

    Explaining that their 92 seats account for 600 to 800 meals a
day and that there is a 45-minute wait for dinner after 6:30,
Spivak says, "It gets very hectic and noisy here at night, so
it's a place to come and eat, not to linger."

    The menu is as fashion-minded as the setting, and the
lunchtime crowd consists of shoppers, officeworkers and junior
executives. Salads and pasta primavera appear to be best
sellers, and 16% of sales comes from such specials as chicken
pie (decent but meager), chili and corned-beef hash (stiff, red
and greasy). "Joe's Special," a dish inspired by Original Joe's
in San Francisco, is one of the better choices, a soothing
scramble of eggs, chopped beef and fresh spinach. Broccoli is
the only other vegetable used, "because it fills the plate
nicely," says Spivak. And certainly the thin ministeak that
sells for $18.50 and supposedly weighs 12 oz. did not fill
anything. "I see this as being one step above a coffee shop,"
says Spivak. If he made it a very small half step, he might be
just about right.