Opening a new restaurant can be as risky as getting into a car with Lindsay Lohan behind the wheel.
Yet while some restaurants around Hartford have appeared then disappeared in rapid fashion, there are others that have not only succeeded once, but upped the odds for success by opening new restaurants under the same brand, in the same market.
From the two-decade old Max Restaurant Group to the thriving Hartford Restaurant Group that didn’t exist at the turn of the millennium to the family of Vito’s restaurants stretching from Middletown to Hartford, the region is proving to be fertile territory for mini-chains of regional restaurants.
More than a dozen eateries in the area are operated by two entities — the Max Restaurant Group and the Hartford Restaurant Group — that have aggressively sought out expansion and done so, by all accounts, with smashing success.
There are, however, significant differences between the two. The Max Restaurant Group has been going strong for 20 years, building restaurants that have different themes, yet each holding out the cachet of the Max name. The group already has six restaurants, with plans for a seventh, Max Fish in Glastonbury that will be next to Max Amore, set to open in October.
Meanwhile, the Hartford Restaurant Group has quickly expanded from one location to seven in the span of just five years, finding two or three formulas and then repeating those in different towns.
It started with four friends — Phil Barnett, Mike Hamlin, Ken McAcoy and Wil Quijano — opening the first Wood-n-Tap restaurant on Hartford’s Sisson Avenue in 2002. In the five years since, the group has opened three more Wood-n-Tap restaurants (in Farmington, Rocky Hill and Southington) and taken on new partners to open Agave Grill and Vaughan’s Public House, both in Hartford.
The decision to expand was made quickly, within a year, when the founders realized Wood-n-Tap had hit upon a formula that worked and worked well. It was decided to replicate the success at subsequent locations.
“We kind of just knew it early on that this could work,” Barnett said.
The latest success story is the Agave Grill, located in Hartford, set for expansion while a second location was opened earlier this year in Southington. There are no formal plans currently to replicate Vaughn’s at another location.
“We’re constantly looking at reinvesting into better quality, more value for the customer,” said Barnett. “We’re more concerned with the experience that people know they will get at a Wood-n-Tap.”
Great Expectations
It’s that familiar experience that helps restaurant chains succeed. Diners want to know what they’re getting. But local restaurants say they can offer the best of both worlds: familiarity, and the knowledge that customers are dealing with a local company.
Vito’s by the Park, on Trumbull Street in Hartford, is a prime example of that. For a decade, the building housed a quartet of failed restaurants until Rob Maffucci opened a second Vito’s location there in 1996.
Vito’s started at its original location in Wethersfield in 1978, opened a third location in Newington in 2002 and is hoping to open a fourth location in January.
Maffucci knew he had a solid product as he noted that many of the Wethersfield customers worked in Hartford. The challenge was to get those Vito’s customers to stop in for a meal while in the city.
The result was a sit-down restaurant joined adjacently by a to-go section for workers on their lunch break to get a quick slice of pizza or a grinder for significantly less.
“There is only so much of the demographic that is going to sit down and pay $50 for lunch,” said Maffucci.
Restaurants are supposed to be all about food and ambiance. But for restaurant owners, it’s all about math. It costs a lot of money to operate a restaurant, and the chance to profit on that investment becomes much more favorable if the job is to build a brand, not just an eatery.
“Our business plan is to go into existing buildings and renovate the space,” Maffucci said. “By my math, we shouldn’t go over $400,000 when taking over a space. If you’re looking at a restaurant from the ground up, that’s $1 to $2 million dollars and that’s scary. We do this with our own money, so there’s no debt involved.”
Maxing Out
For the region’s most upscale restaurant brand, though, new projects aren’t selected based on space availability, but the actual opportunity presented, said Max Restaurant Group owner and CEO Richard Rosenthal .
“Each of our restaurants has its own managing partner so we have that one key person for every location,” he pointed out. “It’s never been a factor whether it’s been existing space or not. In fact, we like to build it from the ground up because we can give it our own look when we start from scratch.”
With the Max brand now a well-known commodity, Rosenthal believes there is a strong built-in customer base whenever the group expands. The key is to give customers a reason to go to the new restaurant.
Despite the brand name, it takes more than the simple act of opening doors to get patrons to flood in. In particular, he cited the slow growth of Trumbull Kitchen, the only restaurant within the group without the Max name.
It opened in spring 2001 but took a while to catch on.
“It was a different concept and the people coming from Max Downtown thought that it wasn’t as good and people didn’t gravitate towards it,” said Rosenthal. “It was geared towards a more young and hip crowd, people in their 20s and 30s and it took a while. It was never unprofitable, it was just a turtle that took a while to get there.”
