The world has changed, and it's almost been 11 years. I have 975 employees. I have six restaurants. We haven't opened any new ones in almost three years.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I always worked in institutions, I never had a restaurant of my own before, but I have opened over 30 hotels, restaurants and casinos. I understand what it takes to keep them running.
I'm lucky that my restaurant partners are my wife Liz and Doug Petkovic. We opened our first restaurant over 15 years ago. And we didn't open up our second restaurant for almost ten years. So that gave us a good foundation of employees.
It all comes back to the basics. Serve customers the best-tasting food at a good value in a clean, comfortable restaurant, and they'll keep coming back.
A thousand restaurants close every month. They re-open, and that's good for America. Nobody's rescuing them. They employ people, too. If we let them go bankrupt, the factories don't go away, the creative people don't go away. They get employed more productively by others.
I love trying new restaurants.
Maybe there are too many restaurants. Maybe some of mine need to close. So be it. I'll live with the market place.
Restaurant industry sales in 2011 are estimated to have reached a record high of $604 billion, up 3.6 percent from 2010. Restaurant employment grew 1.9 percent in 2011, with some 230,000 jobs added, the strongest gain in five years.
I opened my own restaurant when I was 17. I went broke, then traveled around the country, learning about different kinds of foods, had three other restaurants that went broke. It didn't all start just a few years ago!
When restaurants start to mature - and usually the five-year time is the time when the restaurant starts to settle in and have its own personality - your job is to grow it.
I worked in 40 restaurants over a five-year period.