Hartford-based Gjinovefa “Gina” Luari has opened four restaurants in the past six years and has six more in various stages of development.
“I always tell my team there are two things you can’t get back in life, time and opportunity,” Luari says. “And you can’t waste either one of those.”
Luari certainly hasn’t.
At 24, Luari decided to reopen a shuttered diner in a strip retail plaza on Hartford’s Franklin Avenue. She took out a $26,000 credit line and, with elbow grease volunteered by friends and family, created a vibrant atmosphere that would appeal to her as a younger customer.
Patrons can swing in chairs suspended from the ceiling, or take a dip in a tub filled with plastic ball-pit balls. The drinks are colorful, topped with small rubber ducks. The restaurant serves breakfast dishes with an artistic flair all day.
“We are experience-based, from the spaces we design to the food we make,” Luari says. “I think that’s what makes our brand exciting.”
Aided by over-the-top and dynamic food presentation, an inclusive culture and a steady stream of slick, sexy and smart social media, the Place 2 Be quickly lived up to its name, drawing patrons from across Connecticut and nearby states.
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When the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic rocked the restaurant industry, Luari moved forward with plans to open additional Place 2 Be restaurants in downtown Hartford and in West Hartford’s Blue Back Square.
“I had leases signed for downtown and West Hartford,” Luari says. “I had no choice; it was either default or make it happen.”
So Luari pushed ahead, opening the Hartford location in October 2020, and the West Hartford spot in June 2021. As the restaurants bucked trends and brought in customers, Luari set the stage for ambitious growth.
This spring she opened a Place 2 Be at the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. Another will open near Yale University in New Haven.
She plans to open a sixth in Connecticut but is keeping the town’s name under wraps until agreements are finalized.
Luari also has three new restaurant concepts under development in Hartford, including RAW, a raw bar seafood restaurant located at 280 Trumbull St.
Luari plans to open a pizzeria on the first floor of a former firehouse on Pearl Street that is being converted into a mixed-use apartment property.
Renovation of the former Dish Bar & Grill space at 900 Main St. in Hartford will begin shortly. Here, Luari plans to launch Cantina, a restaurant featuring Central and South American cuisine.
Luari recently announced she will open a Place 2 Be restaurant in the Urban Victory Park area of Dallas, next to the American Airlines Center arena in early 2023. It is a bustling area, teeming with office, retail and restaurant activity.
It is also the furthest flung effort yet for Luari, and a good chance to prove her conviction that she can replicate her successes nationally.
“Texas is really going to prove that for us,” Luari says. “It’s a big city. It has tons of competition. I can’t wait to be able to show what we can do in that kind of environment.”
Analytics and marketing
Luari’s restaurants fall under her recently formed company The Statement Group, a banner she expects will cover 50 to 100 restaurants nationally within a decade.
To help manage this growth, Luari is turning to a deep dive on data, from customer metrics to close tracking of her ingredient inventory. She recently hired a vice president of operations, Joshua Pivonka — formerly of internet-based food and delivery service Go Puff — to help manage the growth.
The Place 2 Be’s success owes much to a youthful, ongoing and confident social media marketing campaign. Fun videos posted on Instagram and other channels highlight the experience and draw in crowds.
Luari has on staff a brand manager, creative director and social media manager. The Place 2 Be closely collaborates with about 10 social media influencers in and around Connecticut regularly, and dozens more on an infrequent basis.
All Luari’s staff, from cooks to dishwashers, are encouraged to become “brand ambassadors.” They can collect additional pay, along with merchandise and free meals, by creating social media content outside their shifts.
Luari recalls friends advising her to pull back on advertising in the early days of the pandemic, as many restaurants struggled and failed.
“We actually spent more,” Luari says. “I just thought it was really important that people who were at home know about our presence more than ever. I needed our customer base to know that we are active, how you could order from us, how you could pick up from us. They needed to have more information than ever.”
And the bet seems to have paid off.
The Place 2 Be employed 35 people in 2019 before the pandemic hit. Now, The Statement Group has around 218 employees, Luari says. Revenues have grown from $3 million to about $10 million a year. The addition of Springfield will likely bring in another $4 million.
Immigrant story
Luari’s current drive is strongly rooted in her family tradition, upbringing and past struggles.
Luari’s family fled the small Balkan nation of Albania in April 1998, following a collapse of the government that saw civilians raid state armories for heavy weapons and cities devolve into lawlessness.
Her parents sold their restaurant in Albania without telling anyone and fled to join Luari’s maternal grandfather in East Hartford. It was about 4,500 miles away from everything Luari knew. She was 6.
The day after the Luari family arrived in East Hartford, her father, Ylli Luari, began washing dishes at the Town Line Diner in Rocky Hill. Over the coming decade, he worked his way up to cook, and then bought the place.
Gina and her siblings grew up around the diner. As a young teen, Gina helped her parents keep financial records and fill out forms. She redesigned the menu and launched a website. At 17, she drew up rough designs for an $80,000 renovation.
At 19, Gina Luari joined the Rocky Hill Chamber of Commerce, looking for ways to improve business. At 23, she was hired to run the organization. Three years later, Luari saw a closed diner on Franklin Avenue in Hartford and began dreaming of a spot catering to Millennials moving to the city.
After meeting struggles and taking on hefty responsibilities early in life, that challenge, and all that followed didn’t seem so daunting.
“I feel like the scariest thing in my life has already happened,” Luari says. “I mean, immigrating to a new country, where you don’t speak the language, you don’t have friends, you’ve left your old life behind. That’s the scariest thing that could happen. We were able to make our way through that, so I think we can make our way through anything.”
