A Cocktail Party In The Street: An Interview With Alan Stillman

http://www.ediblegeography.com/a-cocktail-party-in-the-street-an-interview-with-alan-stillman/

A Cocktail Party In The Street: An Interview With Alan Stillman
Nicola
November 15, 2010

In 1965, Alan Stillman was a young man living in Manhattan, who, in his own words, was “looking to meet girls.” The bar restaurant he founded, T.G.I. Friday’s, began life as a public cocktail party — the first neighbourhood joint to welcome both men and women alike, with the express motive to unite the two. Forty-five years later, Stillman’s singles’ bar in the Upper East Side has metamorphosed almost beyond recognition, spawning a landscape of casual dining franchises that redefined the American idea of the restaurant. Stillman himself went on to found iconic steakhouse, Smith & Wollensky, among several other restaurants.

Architect Krista Ninivaggi and I interviewed Stillman for the food issue of the New City Reader; below is an expanded version of the conversation we excerpted in print. In it, Stillman tell us how to create a cocktail party in public, what to do when you get a bad review in the New York Times, and what the restaurant, real estate, and movie businesses all have in common.
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New City Reader: What’s the story behind T.G.I. Friday’s?

Alan Stillman: I lived on 63rd Street between First and York. Easy access to the 59th Street bridge meant you could get out of New York quickly, so in that two or three block neighbour­hood, there was a pile of airline stewardesses — and for whatever reason, there was also a whole bunch of models. Basically, a lot of single people all lived between 60th and 65th and between York Avenue and 3rd Avenue. It seemed to me that the best way to meet girls was to open up a bar.

NCR: Where were those people hanging out before you opened your bar?

Stillman: At the time, it was all cocktail parties. What would happen is that on Wednesday and Thursday, you’d start collecting information—things like, “On Friday night at 8 o’clock at 415 East 63rd Street, there’s going to be great party run by three airline stewardesses.” Then somebody else would say, “Well, I got a good one—it’s going to be run by one of the baseball players at his apartment.” You built up a cocktail list and you bounced from one place to the other. The cocktail parties were wild, by the way. But there was no public place for people between, say, twenty-three to thirty-seven years old, to meet.

NCR: What about other bars — places like P. J. Clarke’s?

Stillman: P. J. Clarke’s was there — it had been in existence forever — but it wasn’t a meeting place. It was a guys’ beer-drinking hangout. There were very few women there. That was pretty typical of the New York bar scene at the time.

The other thing is that my timing was exquisite, because I opened T.G.I. Friday’s the exact year the pill was invented. I happened to hit the sexual revolution on on the head, and the result was that, without really intending it, I became the founder of the first singles bar.

The reason that it happened is that I used to stop into this corner bar near where I lived — a dirty old First Avenue bar with a bullet hole in the window called “The Good Tavern” — and I used to talk to the bartender. I would say to him, “You know, you ought to change the décor in here or do something with it — it would be a great place for all these people round here to meet each other. Eventually he said, “Why don’t you do it?” Five thousand dollars later, I had bought the premises with a short lease, and I was off and running.

NCR: Explain how you went about recreating that cocktail party atmosphere in a public space.

Stillman: All I really did was throw sawdust on the floor and hang up fake Tiffany lamps. I painted the building blue and I put the waiters in red and white striped soccer shirts. If you think that I knew what I was doing, you are dead wrong. I had no training in the restaurant business, or interior design, or architecture — I just have a feel for how to use all those things to create an experience.

I wanted T.G.I. Friday’s to feel like a neighbourhood, corner bar, where you could get a good hamburger, good french fries, and feel comfortable. At the time, it was a sophisticated hamburger and french fry place — apparently, I invented the idea of serving burgers on a toasted English muffin — but the principle involved was to make people feel that they were going to someone’s apartment for a cocktail party.

The food eventually played a larger role than I imagined it would, because a lot of the girls didn’t have enough money to stretch from one paycheque to the other, so I became the purveyor of free hamburgers at the end of the month.

I don’t think there was anything else like it at the time. Before T.G.I. Friday’s, four single twenty-five year-old girls were not going out on Friday nights, in public and with each other, to have a good time. They went to people’s apartments for cocktail parties or they might go to a real restaurant for a date or for somebody’s birthday, but they weren’t going out with each other to a bar for a casual dinner and drinks because there was no such place for them to go.

It took off extraordinarily quickly. In the first six to nine months, T.G.I. Friday’s got written up in Time, Newsweek, and the Saturday Evening Post. Then Maxwell’s Plum opened up across the street, which was another singles bar. It was really quite a phenomenon.

I believe that the first line in the history of bars, restaurants, and discos may have been at T.G.I. Friday’s. Inside of three months, we had to hire a doorman. One night I was tending bar, and he walked up to me and said, “Listen, there’s a dozen people standing outside, and we have no tables and no room at the bar. What do you want me to do?” And I said, “I tell you what. Why don’t you just tell them to wait, and when someone comes out, you’ll let them in.” He said that he didn’t know whether they would wait or not, and I said I didn’t know what else to tell him, and so he went back.

Next thing you know, I came out from behind the bar to get something and I looked outside and there were forty people standing in line. The next week we ended up buying velvet ropes. There was nothing like that anywhere else. You would either have a reservation at a fancy restaurant or you would just go into a bar or diner — nobody would wait in line for food and drink.

NCR: What else did you have to introduce or change in those early months?

Stillman: We had to change the way we ran the place completely. It was a long bar, with bar stools, and I don’t think anyone expected there to be people standing four deep behind the stools. Straightaway, we went from one bartender to three. The waiters couldn’t get through the aisles because of the crowds, so we had to adjust where the seating was. We had to change the menu to be able to get food out of the kitchen more quickly. It was a total readjustment, because no one expected to be doing the kind of business we were doing.

Inside of eighteen months, two more places opened up within a block. By the summer of 1965, the police had to come along, put up barriers, and close First Avenue between 63rd and 64th Street on Friday night from 8 p.m. until midnight, because there were so many kids going back and forth between these bars that the cars couldn’t get through.

We’d moved the cocktail party outside into the streets.

NCR: Did your strategy work? Did you meet good-looking girls?

Stillman: Have you seen the movie Cocktail? Tom Cruise played me! I was lucky enough to do it for three years — he only did it to make a movie. Even today, the advantage of being the guy behind the bar is huge. Why do girls want to date the bartender? To this day, I’m not sure that I get it.

NCR: You opened up twelve T.G.I. Friday’s in total. How did you make the transformation from bar owner to businessman?

Alan Stillman: First of all, I’ll bet you Friday’s spawned thirty to forty restaurants and bars. We hired young people with bartending and waiting experience, and they made a lot of money, and a lot of them went out and opened up their own places.

But the second actual T.G.I. Friday’s was in Memphis, Tennessee. I didn’t pick it — they picked me. The original bar was two years old, and it had national recognition at that point. Somebody came in and said, “I’m from Memphis, Tennessee, and I own a shopping area down there with room for one of these. Will you sell me a franchise?”

I have to admit that I didn’t know what the word franchise meant. So I said, “If you have the money, I’ll be the partner and I’ll show you how to do it, and we’ll split it 50/50.” We shook hands and a year and a half later, we opened up a T.G.I. Friday’s in Memphis. People started coming in there from Little Rock and Nashville, and more guys walked in wanting to partner with me, and so I did the same thing again. Before I knew it I had five or six T.G.I. Friday’s round the country. It wasn’t pre-planned at all.

Then a couple of guys came in from Texas, and said, “We want to do this in Texas, and we want to do it at five times the size, on three floors, with a big central bar.” They had a lot of money and a lot of business expertise, and soon enough we were in Houston and Dallas and on it went.

NCR: Did changing the size of the restaurant change the atmosphere?

Stillman: The size didn’t change it as much as our expansion into the big southern suburban towns. Those cities have a very different way of interacting with the street in the first place, but the big shift was that during the day, we started to get families. We had very informal, casual food — you could get an omelette or a hamburger — so families were coming in with their kids. That was the big change. It took six or seven years, but T.G.I. Friday’s became a very different animal.

By 1971, the economy was very bad. At the time, we had a dozen Friday’s and we were trying to open up three more. By then, everyone was chasing us. There was Somebody Tuesday’s and Bennigan’s and this thing and that thing, and you needed big money to do it right and open three this year, and five next, and ten the year after that. I didn’t want to sell out, but I didn’t not want to either. While we were out trying to raise the money to expand, someone came to me and offered me enough money. With a million dollars at that time, you could retire and do nothing for the rest of your life. So I sold.

NCR: And moved on to Smith & Wollensky?

Stillman: I took a break first. I got married, we travelled around Europe, and that’s where I learned about food and wine. My wife and I spent a lot of time in France, and we became somewhat sophisticated. We saw a lot of French brasseries that served only French wine and French cuisine. When we came back here, the only thing like it was American steakhouses — but they didn’t serve any American wine. I thought that if I opened up a steakhouse and I served Californian wines, maybe I’d have something special and unique, and that’s how Smith & Wollensky got started. It was the American version of the French restaurants I loved in France.

I opened up Smith & Wollensky in 1977, with a list of forty-seven wines — half from California and half from France and Italy because we were scared to death that people weren’t going to order the American bottles, because they didn’t know what the hell they were. When you went into the nine other steakhouses in New York City at the time, you were asked if you wanted red or white.

There was nothing that was in itself hugely original — the menu was more extensive, the décor, the wines — but add it all together and when we opened, we were different from the other steakhouses in town. I did extensive steakhouse research, so we knew exactly what they were doing and what we wanted to do differently.

None of which helped, of course. The first review we got was the worst review in the history of the world. It was by Mimi Sheraton for the New York Times. We almost went broke. So we took out three full-page ads in the Times. At the time, the two big deal steakhouses in New York were The Palm and Christ Cella, and our ad showed two big matchbooks and said, “At last, a match for The Palm and Christ Cella!” We took it out three days in row, and business took off. We hadn’t done any advertising before. We didn’t know how to go out and pitch stories. At the time, no one advertised restaurants, especially not with full pages in the New York Times.

NCR: What else was different about Smith & Wollensky, in terms of menu and decor?

Stillman: I have the original menu here, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what we added that wasn’t on other steakhouse menus at the time.

We were in a former steakhouse that had been completely burnt down. We painted the exterior green and white, and we made the inside more — how shall I say this? — “elegant” than a typical steakhouse was at the time. It had more comfort to it — but that wasn’t because we intended it to be woman-friendly. It was a steakhouse, and at the time, steakhouses were male-oriented. Our target customer was people who ate at The Palm and Christ Cella — men my age. It’s only been in the past few years that I’ve seen people opening up “nightclub” steakhouses that are intended to attract single women. Now, if you want to see where a twenty-seven-year-old wants to eat steak in the year 2008, you should visit the restaurant my son Michael opened, Quality Meats.

A lot of people open up restaurants that fit their age level. It’s much easier for me to open up a restaurant that I understand and that my friends would go to, even today, than it is to open one up for thirty year-olds. I have no understanding of Michael’s new restaurant. I understand that it’s beautiful and the food is wonderful, but as to who it attracts and how — it’s completely foreign to me. It’s too loud and too dark for me and my friends.

I’ve been told that you find the same thing in books, movies, and theatre — that people create things that make sense for their age group.

NCR: Do you see any other analogies between creating a restaurant and directing a film or writing a book?

Stillman: It takes a similar level of creativity as being a movie director, other than you have be more of a businessman. When you walk into a restaurant, you’re looking for an afternoon or an evening of entertainment. The entertainment part of it — the atmosphere and the service and all the little touches — is as important as the food. You can serve the best food in the world, and if people didn’t like the atmosphere and the decor, they won’t come back.

You can’t get me to go to a restaurant that’s got terrible atmosphere and service—it doesn’t matter how good the food is. I won’t go. There’s an enormous amount of creativity in orchestrating a space and an experience so that it creates a particular feeling.

Look at this. [Points to wooden frame around the first Smith & Wollensky menu.] No one presented their menus in a frame at the time. There’s a tremendous amount of creativity in the restaurant business. The problem is that a tremendous number of people think that it requires nothing but creativity, but the business part doesn’t take care of itself.

NCR: How did the feel of Smith & Wollensky evolve over time? What have you done to update it?

Stillman: This is something that I do think I’m good at. The New York City Smith & Wollensky is thirty-three years old, and there are others around the rest of the country that are ten or twelve years old. It’s about changing the place little by little, so that Smith & Wollensky is now fifty percent different than it was when it opened — but you wouldn’t know it. If you don’t know how to update your restaurant while keeping it the same, it will close after six or seven years.

The menu has to expand because you add new things to keep ahead of the competition but you have to keep the customer favorites. Dishware and glassware needs to be updated. It’s the things around the edges of the experience — sides, desserts, wines — that you can change. We’ve gone from four desserts to fourteen, made by an in-house pastry-chef.

I am very hands-on about this stuff. I choose the silverware, I make decisions about the decor, and I try every single thing on the menu. That’s my favourite part. The rest of it is just running a business. The fact that you’re selling steaks instead of widgets doesn’t make much difference.

NCR: How did Smith & Wollensky grow? Did you plan to open more than one from the start?

Stillman: No, definitely not. I actually had partners at Smith & Wollensky that didn’t want to expand — they didn’t want to take the risk and they wanted to take money out of the business rather than put more in. That’s not a fault — it’s just a business decision that you make. Smith & Wollensky in New York City stayed on its own from 1977 to 1997. It took me twenty years to buy the right to expand from them.

NCR: Smith & Wollensky has remained in cities as it expands. Is that a conscious strategy?

Stillman: Smith & Wollensky is definitely an urban restaurant. These are big restaurants doing big dollars, and we have to be in big cities.

My second one was in South Beach, in Miami. We looked at Chicago, South Beach, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and wherever the right property showed up first, we built.

NCR: When you go looking for a Smith & Wollensky site, do you have a checklist?

Stillman: Yes. The bigger you get, the better your list gets. By the time you’re the size of McDonald’s, you don’t have to bother looking. You run your checklist up against some data and you know exactly where you can put your restaurant and where you can’t. Then it’s just a matter of getting hold of the real estate.

The single most important thing on Smith & Wollensky’s checklist is the ability to have an exterior look that is different from everybody else. That’s the deal-breaker — and the hardest part to find. We can’t put it in any old big office building because the owners won’t let us do that. We want people to drive by, not read the name, and say, “That’s Smith & Wollensky.” We started out like that with our first building, on the corner of Forty-ninth Street and Third Avenue, so it became our brand.

The other thing is that we build big restaurants. We’ve got seven hundred seats in most of our places, so we need the square footage. That’s an economic decision, not an atmosphere one. Big box, big tickets — that’s our formula.

The restaurant business does come down to real estate, though. A restaurant owner is renting or sub-letting you a piece of real estate for the evening, and how long you sit there and how much you spend determines whether they’re going to be successful or not.

Once I was in the $75 ticket business, then I started looking around and getting other ideas. I like to fill holes — figure out what’s missing and supply it. I opened Park Avenue and The Post House and the Manhattan Ocean Club, which has since turned into Quality Meats.

NCR: What’s missing in the New York City restaurant-scape right now?

Stillman: There’s very little missing in New York at the moment. It’s the food capital of the world, in my opinion. There is still room for originality — for example, my son, Michael, opened up the only Polynesian restaurant in town. There are not many holes like that to be filled, but there are other kinds of holes — the kind that you can fill with décor, atmosphere, prices, and imagination. And there are geographical holes — for example, I personally think that in Midtown, there is room for a high-end Indian restaurant.

Of course, you don’t have to open up something that fills a hole. There are a lot of people doing perfectly good business opening up more same-old steakhouses. That’s just not where the fun is for me.

NCR: Are there any current food trends that you find particularly intriguing?

Stillman: I don’t quite get the celebrity chef thing. What are these guys doing cooking meals on television? And why do they have multiple restaurants? Star chefs used to have a restaurant, and when you went there, he cooked for you. To me, if you’re not in the kitchen cooking, then I’m not eating your food.

I’m not condemning Wolfgang Puck and the others, but this celebrity chef trend has changed the feeling of what cooking is at a certain level.

Now Steve Wynn, with his hotels in Las Vegas, put his foot down and made star chefs sign multi-year contracts that they would be there five nights a week. Mr. Wynn has got 1500 rooms and a gambling empire on top of the restaurants, so he can afford to go to Paul Bartolotta and pay him a million dollars a year to be there five nights a week. And the result is probably the best Italian seafood restaurant in the whole world.

NCR: Do you prefer eating out at restaurants or eating at home?

Stillman: By choice, I would eat out six nights a week. It’s better and easier — and even if you were wealthy enough to have a personal chef who did all the work for you, it seems to me as though it would get boring after a while. I want to go out and see what’s going on in the city, and try different cuisines, and different cooking styles. The only reason I’d want to stay home once in a while is that maybe I want to watch a movie or read a book over dinner.

I eat in one of my own restaurants once a week. The rest is split: two-thirds, places I know and love; and one-third, new places I want to try. In my head, I’m not going for business reasons, but my wife will tell you that when I’m out, whether I know the place or not, if she allowed me I’d pull out a pen and paper and start taking notes. She’s probably right. I’m a great stealer. I see things and bring them back to the business all the time.

[NOTE: I owe an enormous thanks to Alan Stillman for sharing his time and reminiscences so generously, and to Krista Ninivaggi, who coordinated and co-conducted the interview.]

Fat Profits

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/01/13/CKE-Hardees-Profile/

Fat Profits
by Joe Keohane
February 2008 Issue

You want onion rings with that? They're already in the burger—along with bacon, cheese, BBQ sauce, and a corporate philosophy that says to hell with the health police. How a fast-food chain is pushing gluttony to new extremes and changing America's attitude toward eating.

It was a patriotic statement that went a bit too far afield: an attempt to create the "ultimate picnic burger." Called the Fourth of July Burger, it was tested last summer at seven locations by the West Coast fast-food chain Carl's Jr. and consisted of a huge beef patty topped with pickles, ketchup, mustard, potato chips, and a hot dog. Stacked high and loaded with fat and calories, it was the food equivalent of the national anthem played through a sousaphone, a perfect distillation of a peculiarly American form of balls-out, postmodern gluttony that, at least outwardly, we're all supposed to be ashamed of right now.

Yet for all its pomp and glory, it didn't quite work. When John Koncki, director of product development for Carl's Jr., talks about it now, he comes across a little wistful. It tasted really good, he says, but the name and the concept proved too much for the testers. "Sometimes," the earnest Koncki says, "some of the sandwiches are so unique that consumers can't wrap their heads around them."

The uniqueness isn't the only thing that's hard to get your head around. During the past few years, CKE Restaurants, the parent company of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's, has employed an audacious go-for-bloat approach that defies just about everything you've come to assume about the business of modern fast food. (See nutrition data for CKE franchises and other fast-food chains.) In an age when other chains have been forced to at least pretend that they care about the health of their customers and have started offering packets of apples and things sprinkled with walnuts and yogurt, Hardee's and Carl's Jr. are purposely running in the opposite direction, unapologetically creating an arsenal of higher-priced, high-fat, high-calorie monstrosities—pioneering avant-garde concepts such as "meat as a condiment" and "fast-food porn"—and putting the message out to increasingly receptive consumers with ads that are often as controversial as the burgers themselves.

That message may be revolutionary or totally evil or maybe both, but in any case, it goes like this: Anyone can make Americans fat (hell, everyone already has), but only one fast-food company can make them fat and allow them to feel good about it, even get them to feel like they're making a statement and striking a blow against the forces of political correctness. It's downright Jeffersonian in its own weird way, and judging by the growth of both chains, it's working extraordinarily well. Since 2000, CKE's average sales per store have increased by 31 percent, a rate greater than any other burger chain's, save for the nostalgia-mongering Sonic drive-ins, with which CKE is tied. And its stock soared, from about $2 in 2001 to more than $22 last June, before slipping back to around $15 at the end of the year.

Even more interesting is the growing influence of CKE—a regional company that, with more than 3,000 locations, operates the country's 11th- and 12th-largest fast-food chains—on the way fast food is perceived and marketed in America. With its sheer audacity, its philosophy that no one ever went broke overestimating the American appetite, CKE functions as a sort of id for the larger chains, a direct line into the lizard brain of the male fast-food eater. It has envisioned a future even more gluttonous than the present, it has made money, and now others are taking notice.

After a period of collective indigestion induced by the 2004 documentary Super Size Me and the 2001 book Fast Food Nation and its subsequent film adaptation, much of the industry is returning to its traditional customers—men—and its traditional food—meat—served up in ever-greater quantities. Although CKE's signature behemoths—the Carl's Jr. Double Six Dollar Burger and Hardee's Monster Thickburger, both introduced in 2004—out-calorie all comers, Burger King narrowed the gap with its Triple Whopper With Cheese (2005); Wendy's unveiled the Baconator (2007), which we'll get to shortly; and Taco Bell awakened the industry to new possibilities with its 2006 campaign, which urged customers to enjoy a "fourth meal" each day.

The greasy gridiron is becoming well trod, but the first footprints were CKE's. Conrad Lyon, a restaurant-industry analyst for FTN Midwest Securities, says Hardee's and Carl's Jr. "were the ones that really just threw it in your face, so to speak, and did so in a somewhat egregious way."

Andrew Puzder, 57, chief executive of CKE, sits behind an imposing desk in his office at company headquarters in Carpinteria, California (which, for what it's worth, has a gym and no cafeteria), wearing jeans and an untucked Abercrombie & Fitch button-down. Although he spends a lot of time visiting restaurants, eating at a Carl's Jr. or a Hardee's four or five times a week and opting most consistently for his favorite, the Carl's Jr. Six Dollar Burger, he's fit and sinewy, an avid weight lifter and runner—living proof, he says, that customers don't have to be overweight if they exercise and balance their diets. "I think you need the variety of things," he says. "I eat a lot of fruit and vegetables too." Asked whether he thinks it's ironic that a fitness buff runs a company famous for health-destroying burgers, he says, "I think it's an irony that I'm running CKE, even if I didn't exercise. I was a trial lawyer. I think they all thought they were bringing me in to take the company into bankruptcy."

Puzder was working for a law firm in St. Louis when he met CKE founder Carl Karcher and wound up representing the fast-food magnate in a securities-fraud case. The two men became close; Karcher hired Puzder to handle his personal trust and then, in 1997, to serve as CKE's corporate counsel. That same year, CKE acquired the grimy, moribund Hardee's Food Systems. In June 2000, Puzder was appointed Hardee's president and chief executive, and he became CKE's president and C.E.O. soon afterward. Once he took the helm, he began visiting Hardee's restaurants and was appalled at what he found. The places were filthy, the service was terrible, and the cut-rate food wasn't any good. Puzder instituted policies to take care of the first two problems and then started in on the menu. Working with the ad agency Mendelsohn Zien, a Los Angeles-based firm known for its provocative spots and affinity for companies on life support, Puzder scrapped the old menu, which offered everything from cheap burgers to fried chicken to hot dogs, and devised a new one that focused on bigger burgers for "young, hungry guys" (a phrase chanted like a mantra at headquarters) who were sick of being told what they should and should not eat.

Under Puzder, in 2001, the similarly struggling Carl's Jr. introduced the Six Dollar Burger, a half-pound, premium offering intended to rival the fare of "sit-down" restaurants like T.G.I. Friday's. It was meant to taste like a $6 burger: The retail price was $3.95, expensive for a fast-food chain, but Puzder believes that fast-food customers are more discerning than people think they are and want higher-quality ingredients—such as beef from an Angus cow—than those found in ordinary patties.

The Six Dollar Burger did well with customers and in 2002 won the Silver Skillet Award from Restaurant Business magazine. Puzder saw the future. "I think a lot of this everybody's-gonna-eat-healthy thing is more a concern of people in the media than a concern of people who come into our restaurants," he says. Fast-food customers had indeed been clamoring for healthy alternatives, which prompted an industrywide stampede toward salads and orange slices, but just because customers wanted them on the menu didn't necessarily mean they wanted to eat them. For all the buzz created by snack wraps and yogurt parfaits, burgers and fries remain the two most frequently ordered items in American restaurants, according to industry research group NPD Foodworld. In fact, the addition of salads at McDonald's and other chains is partly aimed at drawing more burger-eating men by placating wives and girlfriends who would otherwise veto the restaurant choice. "What people say they want and what they do don't match up," says Darren Tristano, an executive vice president at Technomic, a food-industry research and consulting firm. "If they say, 'I'm gonna order more salads,' they're going to order more french fries." CKE marketing head Brad Haley, who looks a bit like a golfer with his short-sleeve shirt, goatee, and nascent paunch, echoes the sentiment. "People say what makes them feel better about themselves in surveys."

So Hardee's dispensed with any semblance of social conscience and in 2003 introduced the Thickburger. In 2004, this begat the downright lurid Monster Thickburger, a messy two-thirds of a pound of charbroiled Angus beef containing more than 1,400 calories and 107 grams of fat. Soon afterward, when McDonald's, under fire in the wake of Super Size Me, responded to critics by phasing out its supersize menu, Thickburgers were there to help fill the void. Sales soared, nutritionists cried foul, and a string of burgers of escalating perversity followed from both Hardee's and Carl's Jr.: the Breakfast Burger (a huge patty crowned with a fried egg, bacon, and hash browns), the Philly Cheese Steak Thickburger (topped with sliced steak and cheese), and the Pastrami Burger (take a guess).

When the latter two prompted a horrified Jay Leno to denounce CKE for using meat as "a condiment for other meats," CKE was delighted and started touting "meat as a condiment" in its promotional materials. "When we do a big, decadent burger," says Haley, a man whose office fridge is full of nothing but springwater and Diet Coke, "we'll send the press release to Jay Leno, and we're not afraid if he says, 'This disgusting thing is 5,000 calories.'?"

Leno's disgust has become a reliable boost to CKE's sales. Every time the company introduces a new item, he attacks it, but not before running down its entire list of ingredients in detail, as he did in late 2007 when Hardee's unveiled its contribution to the rapidly growing breakfast market, the Country Breakfast Burrito. Consisting of two eggs, ham, bacon, sausage, cheese, and sausage gravy in a flour tortilla, it has 60 grams of fat and more than 900 calories—the biggest in the land, a belt notch ahead of the Carl's Jr. Breakfast Burger, which comes in at 830 calories. When Haley was quoted as saying that the burrito finally makes a big country breakfast portable, Leno, in one of two separate bits he did on the breakfast beast, quipped, "See, this way you can take it with you in the ambulance after your heart stops." Says Puzder: "A lot of people think Leno's on the payroll."

Some other major fast-food chains have been heading down the same path as Hardee's. Six weeks after Hardee's Country Breakfast Burrito appeared, McDonald's countered with the 610-calorie McSkillet Burrito, featuring egg, sausage, potatoes, and American and Monterey Jack cheeses. In the past four years, Burger King and McDonald's have introduced Angus burgers, and Burger King went for sheer excess with its colossal Meatnormous omelet and BK Stackers (multiple patties in one bun). Burger King began offering stackers in 2006 because "we went out and talked to superfans, and they told us a menu gap we had was a really indulgent meat-and-cheese burger," says John Schaufelberger, head of global product innovation. Since then, Burger King's share price has nearly doubled. A spokeswoman for McDonald's said it is testing the Angus burger in response to customer wishes. McDonald's has otherwise lagged in the big-burger arms race but has dramatically boosted its share price in the past five years via a multipronged approach involving everything from premium coffee and better service to an expanded menu and the ubiquitous I'm Lovin' It marketing campaign.

Last summer, Wendy's introduced the Baconator—two hamburger patties, two slices of American cheese, and no fewer than six strips of bacon. Wendy's spokesman Denny Lynch says research shows that customers had an unslakable yearning for more bacon. "Well, if they like two strips of bacon, would they like three? And if they like three, how about six? And that's where the Baconator came from," he says, adding, "there is a trend toward large, indulgent hamburgers." Wendy's (which now also serves stacker-style burgers) reinforced that trend in November, when it announced it would be creating a Philly Style Hoagie Burger—two patties covered with salami, ham, and creamy Italian dressing. And both Burger King and Wendy's have run quirky, somewhat absurdist ads tailored specifically for the young, hungry, male sensibility, though their spots aren't nearly as provocative as CKE's. In 2006, for instance, Burger King launched its I Am Man campaign, in which fed-up men who marched down the street decrying "chick food" opted for Burger King's Texas Double Whopper.

Newton, Mississippi, is a place of churches, farmland, and small, low-slung, porch-heavy houses. But the highway on the outskirts of town is strewn with the sorts of chain restaurants that have contributed to Mississippi's standing as the fattest state in the nation. A whopping 30.6 percent of its residents are obese, according to the nonprofit group Trust for America's Health.

Vying for the attention of passersby are a McDonald's, a Sonic, a K.F.C., a Taco Bell, and, in the shadow of a Wal-Mart Supercenter poised atop a grassy incline, a Hardee's.

This is prime Hardee's country. According to CKE's internal market numbers, two-thirds of Hardee's locations are in small towns, mostly in the Southeast and Midwest. Blue-collar white males are well represented in Hardee's customer base, and one-third of all its customers fall within the coveted 18- to 34-year-old demographic. More than 70 percent of Thickburgers are bought by men. Carl's Jr.'s patrons also skew male, though they're more moneyed; 29 percent make more than $75,000 a year.

"We have a lot of young, hungry guys, a lot of construction workers," says Bill Boddie, who owns the most Hardee's franchises—343 restaurants in North Carolina, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Virginia. "And they burn up calories. They want something big, and they want something good to eat. They're the ones who buy the huge burgers and the huge breakfast burritos."

At around 1 p.m. on a Sunday, the Newton Hardee's is starting to fill up. It's a beige-and-red box, incongruously colorful against its mostly gray setting, giving it the air of forced gaiety and desolation one tends to find in fast-food restaurants located by highway interchanges. A good number of patrons come in wearing their church clothes. The clean interior is adorned with comment cards and vintage photos of Hardee's restaurants before they went to seed in the '90s. Like Carl's Jr., Hardee's offers limited table service, so after ordering, you take a seat and one of the employees working the counter brings your meal to you. Tony Adams, a big, bearded 45-year-old wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and a blue-and-white trucker hat, has been working as a cattle-and-crop researcher for the state for 26 years. His current title is dairy herdsman. Today, he sits in the middle of the dining room with his diminutive, white-haired mother, Arlie Mae Adams, who is clad in a robin's-egg-blue outfit and gold flats. They're regulars: Tony says he eats at Hardee's four times a month, sometimes breakfast, sometimes lunch or dinner. He's quietly, methodically working on a Philly Cheese Steak Thickburger, a large fries, and a tankard of soda. It takes him a solid 15 minutes to get through it all. Arlie Mae is eating a comparatively dainty Big Chicken Fillet Sandwich (770 calories) and fries and drinking a "small" Coke, which is about the size of her thigh. A quote printed on her cup, which reads "Hardee's knows what America wants," is attributed to the Marshall Independent, a Minnesota newspaper.

His lunch effectively vanquished, Tony packs up his wrappers, ambles across the dining room, and dumps them in the trash, then plunks himself back down at the table. "It was good," he says, leaning back in his chair. Asked whether he buys into the notion that a fast-food chain shouldn't sell such hefty fare, he rolls his eyes and snorts. "I wouldn't agree with that," he says. "I don't got no complaints."

"To me," chimes in Arlie Mae, "Hardee's is the best fast food in town."

There's a certain kind of genius at work here, evidence of a well-thought-out defensive game. By not merely disclosing the fat and calorie content of its products but actively boasting about it, CKE effectively declaws the so-called food police, who act on the assumption that people eat fast food only because they don't know it's bad for them. This frankness makes CKE less vulnerable to the sort of social, political, and even legal pressure that its rivals—particularly McDonald's, which offers pedometers with its Go Active Adult Happy Meal—feel so acutely. Far from shameful, it's a point of manly pride to go to Hardee's for lunch and scarf down a Monster Thickburger, a chocolate shake (made with real ice cream, it has three times the fat of the McDonald's version), and a medium fries, which adds up to 170 grams of fat and 2,760 calories. And the more society's nannies say you shouldn't, the more you kind of want to.

The same subversive approach is applied to the company's advertising. In general, CKE doesn't market directly to children. It did recently sign a promotional deal with the producers of the animated film Igor—which stars, coincidentally, Jay Leno. But Puzder says the agreement involves only in-restaurant publicity (small posters as well as toys or action figures given away with meals), not TV or radio, which spares the company trouble with its detractors.

Instead, CKE continues to target the aforementioned "young, hungry guys," along with the people who, for whatever reason, aspire to be like them. This gives the firm a fair amount of leeway. Its most famous ad starred a soaked, soapy, scantily clad Paris Hilton washing a car while eating the mammoth Spicy BBQ Six Dollar Burger. The spot created a big stir, which culminated in Bill O'Reilly's expressing his outrage in two separate segments (during which the ad ran continuously), telling Puzder, "Families looking at this…a lot of them are going to go, 'Well, we hate you. We hate you.'?" Puzder says, "They complained about the sex in the ad, and I said there wasn't even a guy in it. It was a beautiful woman in a bathing suit eating a burger and washing a car. What could be more American?"

Other ads have included a gorgeous woman riding a mechanical bull while eating a Western Bacon Six Dollar Burger, an attractive woman inserting her entire fist into her mouth to demonstrate the oral capacity one would need to down a Monster Thickburger in a single go, and a Playmate-flanked Hugh Hefner holding one of several varieties of the Six Dollar Burger, with the tagline, "Because guys don't like the same thing night after night." The Hefner spot drew fire from televangelist Robert Schuller, who was quoted in news reports as saying that devout Christian Carl Karcher was "just heartbroken" by the wanton carnal innuendo on display. Puzder says Karcher, who maintained an office at CKE's offices in Anaheim until his death January 11 at the age of 90, "hated the ads for 12 years" but understood their necessity. Puzder, a Catholic, says, "I'm probably more a member of the religious right than I am anything else, so these are my people I'm offending. That's kind of a weird thing, but I can't run the business to the aesthetic tastes of any particular group in the country. And I will tell you, when we run these ads, sales go up and they don't come down."

While the stocks of other fast-food chains had mixed results in the second half of 2007, CKE's share price tumbled. Puzder says an unfounded report in June that CKE was a buyout target artificially drove up the stock price, which was then buffeted by rising food and fuel costs. He says the company, which owns 30 percent of its restaurants and franchises the rest, is more vulnerable to cost increases than Burger King or McDonald's, which have a much higher proportion of franchised outlets, where local owners bear the risk. CKE has sold about 136 of its Hardee's to franchisees in the past year, Puzder adds, "so we've reduced our exposure" as well as raised money to build and remodel more restaurants. It also sold off the underperforming La Salsa chain to focus on Green Burrito and Red Burrito, which are often located within Carl's Jr. and Hardee's locations, respectively. CKE is looking to expand Carl's Jr. to Canada and push Hardee's deeper into its U.S. markets, focusing especially on Texas and the Atlanta area. "We have a lot of room to grow," Puzder says.

Amid all the bluster, CKE has made a couple of concessions. Carl's Jr. offers a charbroiled-chicken salad that has just seven grams of fat, and Hardee's serves a barbecued-chicken sandwich. "It's a very healthy sandwich. I think we sell about two a day," Pudzer quips. Both chains offer token salads, just lettuce and tomato, that don't sell either. Recently CKE pulled the Double Six Dollar Burger from the Carl's Jr. menu in California and plans to do the same nationwide, due to a lawsuit alleging that the two mammoth patties contain an unacceptable amount, according to California law, of a carcinogen commonly created by grilling meats. This means a burger so big it may actually have been illegal. It's still available to customers upon request, which is tantamount to the public's giving informed consent under the law. And on the ad side, a recent spot for the Carl's Jr. patty-melt sandwich—featuring a young, blond teacher with no backside to speak of gyrating on her desk while her students rap about how they like "flat buns"—drew such heated protest from teachers that Puzder withdrew it. "I can defend the sex," he says, "but I can't fight teachers."

All that being said, he plans to stay the course. CKE's bare-bones product-development team of 16 people tests new Carl's Jr. items at corporate headquarters on a sampling of its own employees. One of the female testers, public relations manager Beth Mansfield, appears dazed after enduring one such session. It was "three solid hours of eating," she says. If a quorum can't be assembled, CKE calls in some employees from the office next door, which houses an alternative-energy firm by the name of Clipper Windpower.

Late last year, Carl's Jr. all but parodied the smoothie craze with its Strawberry Banana Smoothie (made with ice cream, it has nearly 700 calories). The development team is currently working on a Cap'n Crunch shake, featuring vanilla ice cream and crushed Cap'n Crunch cereal. The next sandwich is going to be a spicy jalapeño burger for Hardee's, with sliced jalapeños and a liberal slathering of its zesty Southwest sauce.

Beyond that, CKE is tight-lipped. But whatever it is that CKE ends up unleashing on the world, it's safe to say it will be huge, fattening, delicious, and marketed, however unwittingly, by Jay Leno, Bill O'Reilly, and entire battalions of the gastronomically correct.

National Burger Chain Taste Test

http://food.yahoo.com/blog/ahamburgertoday/40/national-burger-chain-taste-test

National Burger Chain Taste Test
Posted Wed, Jan 23, 2008

After focusing primarily on mom-and-pop burger joints on A Hamburger Today, I felt it was high time to explore the world of burgers in the "casual dining" sector. More than a few AHT readers had emailed expressing the opinion that Houlihan's or Red Robin or T.G.I. Friday's had surprisingly good burgers. Countless television commercials touting the fare at these bar-and-grill type restaurants played a part, too, getting me off the couch and into the booths of four of the nation's most recognizable chains in the course of one day.

My mission was to sample cheeseburgers, collect visual intel, and report my findings to you, our burger-loving readers. I sampled standard cheeseburgers at Houlihan's, Applebee's, T.G.I.Friday's, and Red Robin, asking for medium-rare or as close to it as possible. Below are the results.

HOULIHAN'S
Locations: 80 in 21 states; reviewed at 139 Flatbush Ave., Brooklyn NY 11217
Cost: $8.79 (comes with choice of fries, coleslaw, or tortilla chips and salsa)
Meat: 3/5
Bun: 2/5
Toppings: 4/5
Cheese: 3/5
Presentation: 4/5
Overall: 3/5

First up was Houlihan's, the smallest chain among those that I tried, with 80 locations in 21 states. Of the four casual dining options of the day, Houlihan's was the most upscale, with a decor that might be described as "slightly swanky"--dark wood accents; dark, moody lighting; a conservative amount of framed retro French movie posters on the walls; and a low-key vibe that matched the Stereolab soundtrack that back the muted Jets game on a handful of strategically placed flat-panel TVs. Service was adequate--friendly but not overbearing.

I ordered the cheeseburger, advertised on the menu as 100 percent fresh Angus beef, medium-rare, and it arrived at table about ten minutes thereafter, cooked well north of desired doneness, to about medium-well. As all burgers at the four restaurants, this one came standard with lettuce, tomato, and red onion were all fresh-tasting, crisp, and cool. The bun was a bit too thick and also dry, throwing off the meat-to-bun ratio and also doing nothing to help the dryness of the overcooked patty. The meat itself tasted like it could have been a contender, had it not been done to within an inch of its life. And, for what looked like a beefy burger as presented, the patty itself only contributed about half an inch to the sandwich's thickness.

APPLEBEE'S
Locations: 1,804 in 49 states; reviewed at 395 Flatbush Ave. Extension, Brooklyn NY 11201
Cost: $7.59 (comes with fries)
Meat: 2/5
Bun: 4/5
Toppings: 3/5
Cheese: 2/5
Presentation: 3/5
Overall: 2/5

Not more than a few blocks away from the Houlihan's, Applebee's was the next stop on my burger tour. With 1,804 locations in 49 states, you've likely been to an Applebee's, so descriptions are almost unnecessary. This one varied very little from the ones I'd grown up around near Overland Park, Kansas, which is corporate home to the chain--plenty of art on the walls to look at, brass rails, and stained-glass lighting fixtures. Service here, too, was friendly, with very attentive hosts and servers, and the food arrived quickly.

The meat here is also billed as 100 percent Angus beef, and, as the menu states, "All burgers are cooked to medium/medium-well." "Are the burgers fresh or frozen?" I asked the waiter. "Frozen," he replied. Not looking good, I thought, but resolved to give the burger a fair shake. I asked for it as close to medium as possible, but it came out (sloppily presented) very well done and so over salted as to be almost inedible. I was unable to ascertain the flavor of the beef for all the salt. Lettuce, tomato, and onion were all fresh tasting, and the bun was very good--perfectly toasted, soft and squishy, and cornmeal-dusted for some texture on top--but they couldn't make up for the patty they accompanied. I gave up after eating a quarter of this burger.

T.G.I.FRIDAY'S
Locations: 576 in 47 states; reviewed at 372 Fulton Street Brooklyn NY 11201
Cost: $10.99
Meat: 3/5
Bun: 3/5
Toppings: 2/5
Cheese: 4/5
Presentation: 3/5
Overall: 3/5

Upset at the lackluster showing at Applebee's, I was looking for burger redemption at T.G.I.Friday's. I ended up at an interesting location: the former Gage & Tollner, a landmark Brooklyn restaurant until its closing in February 2004. Though locals bemoaned the fact that a chain replaced the venerable institution, a T.G.I.Friday's is not entirely out of place here; it moved into a space with cherrywood accents, a mahogany bar, and cut-glass chandeliers--just the type of atmosphere the branches I've visited elsewhere try to evoke.

I skipped the Jack Daniel's burger (special JD-infused sauce) in favor of a regular cheeseburger so as to keep T.G.I.Friday's on a level playing field with the other sandwiches eaten. Here, the menu made no mention of Angus beef nor issued any prescriptive proclamations as to doneness; I ordered medium-rare with American cheese. Again, the burger that arrived at table was cooked far beyond what I had ordered, though this time to medium-well. Presentation was adequate, and the burger certainly looked hefty but, as at Houlihan's, the patty here was a relatively small part of equation. Despite the overcooking, there was still some juiciness left in the beefy-tasting patty, and the bun was lightly toasted and pillowy. Toppings were haphazardly stacked and of subpar quality, I ended up jettisoning the shredded lettuce, too-thick tomatoes, and mushy pickles that tasted more like cucumbers.

RED ROBIN
Locations: 307 in 35 states; reviewed at 265 State Hwy. Route 3E, Clifton NJ 07014
Cost: $8.99 (comes with "bottomless" steak fries)
Meat: 4/5
Bun: 4/5
Toppings: 4/5
Cheese: 3/5
Presentation: 5/5
Overall: 4/5

The last burger of the day, which I ate sometime around 10 p.m., was from Red Robin. For this stop, I took out a Zipcar and made the 14-mile, two-hour journey to Clifton, New Jersey, the nearest location to my home. Perhaps it's a bit unfair to throw this one in the mix, since Red Robin is a casual-dining concept based on burgers, whereas the other three do not place the noble sandwich at the center of their business. But it serves as an example of what the other bar and grills should aim for. Here, the burger's price was in line with the first three sites but it far outstripped them in terms of quality.

Red Robin has an atmosphere that's similar to, but a bit more staid, than Applebee's--call it Applebee's Lite. Like the Applebee's I visited, the hosts and servers were very friendly and attentive, and the food arrived at table in almost no time. The 22 specialty burgers on the menu here, all made from fresh ground beef, are cooked "with some pink or no pink," according to my server. I ordered "some pink." Of the chains, this one cooked the burger closest to the temperature I had ordered. I didn't see much pink in the patty, but it remained juicy nonetheless. Toppings were of good quality, sandwiched with patty and melted cheese within a toasted, sesame-seed covered bun. Presentation was flawless, with the burger arriving at table neatly wrapped yet bursting from its wax-paper wrapping, accompanied by a handful of steak fries in a plastic burger basket. As with the other three burgers, the meat-to-bun ratio skewed a bit in favor of bready. Still, after 2.25 burgers earlier in the day, I felt compelled to finish this one.

And thus ended my day and night recon of the mid-range casual-dining burgerworld. Though I'm disheartened by what I found, I realize there are some decent sandwiches to be had. For that reason, I will expand my scope and explore other chains in the near future--notably Ruby Tuesday, which had closed for the evening by the time I made it through the Lincoln Tunnel. Also on the list: Bennigan's, Chili's, and any others that you might wish to suggest to me.