Restauratour: California Tortilla a Work in Progress

California Tortilla plays with its interior design as it prepares to expand more aggressively.

By Lisa Bertagnoli, Contributing Editor -- Chain Leader, 5/1/2006

Take an online tour of California Tortilla.

The plumbing needed fixing. A staircase in the center of the restaurant had to be moved. But even with those major faults, California Tortilla couldn’t say no to a two-story, 4,700-square-foot location on Main Street in Newark, Del., just steps away from the University of Delaware campus.

Main Street “is like a carnival when the weather is nice,” says co-founder Alan Cohen, who is also head of new store construction and design for the Rockville, Md.-based chain. Indeed, the restaurant was packed on a recent pleasant spring day, even though it was the first day of spring break for the university.

Besides, “kids find us,” Cohen says. “That’s how we have grown.”

The restaurant’s interior certainly gives off a carnival vibe. The walls are painted unabashed orange, lime green and yellow. A glass case stocked with bottles of hot sauce, many with lively names, lines the entryway. Red chili-pepper lights hang from the black ceiling. Booths are a deep burgundy, and the tabletops are a collage of burgundy, yellow and orange. Halogen spots light “rave boards,” geometric plaques that hold restaurant reviews and other press clippings.

Major Change
Located in a former Italian restaurant, the Newark restaurant is the first two-story store in the system. While the location is desirable, the facility needed work, including new plumbing, new bathrooms and a new place for a staircase located in the middle of the restaurant. If left there, the staircase would have blocked entering customers’ views of the open kitchen, a key design element at California Tortilla. Because of all the structural changes, the buildout of the Newark location cost $330,000, about a third more than the average California Tortilla.

In addition to the second floor, the Newark location includes quite a few additions to the basic design scheme. To start, the restaurant has booths and banquettes. The first batch of California Tortilla locations didn’t offer booth seating. However, booths add a warmer feeling to the dining room, Cohen says: “People gravitate toward booths. They’re in their own little world.”

Another first: a low wall that cordons off the dining room from the doorway and entryway. Before, customers would meander through the dining area to get to the ordering counter. The wall helps guide traffic flow from the door to the counter, Cohen says.

Another change: Floors, once painted, are now linoleum. The linoleum is easy to clean and far more durable than paint, according to Cohen.

Several design experiments won’t move on to other stores. For instance, a mottled-blue vinyl that serves as wainscoting in the entryway and as a cover on the low wall doesn’t work because the color is too serious, Cohen says. He’ll replace it with a mottled-yellow vinyl that complements the lime, orange and yellow wall colors.

Working Toward a Standard
The Newark location brings the chain one step closer to a standard look and procedure for the stores, says Brian Laug, principal at Heath Design Group, the Baltimore-based design firm on the project. “We’re trying not to reinvent the wheel each time on these,” he says.

So far, standardization has been difficult because no two California Tortilla stores are alike. The Newark location, at 4,700 square feet, is nearly twice as big as the ideal California Tortilla location, and the original unit, in Washington, D.C.’s Chinatown, is only 17 feet wide. “They’re not the standard 20-by-80 box,” Laug says. “All seem to have their own nuances.”

California Tortilla expects the Newark location to generate at least $1.2 million in unit sales. The average unit volume for California Tortilla ranges from $1.1 million to $1.5 million, except for its unit at the Baltimore/Washington International airport, which tracks at $1.7 million.

Standardization is crucial at this point, due to the chain’s stepped-up expansion plans. California Tortilla has opened 17 locations in the past 16 years. Current expansion plans call for 10 units to open this year and 10 in 2007. “We have to tone this thing down so it’s a little more automatic from the design and construction-cost standpoint,” Laug says.

Cohen allows that standardization is necessary as expansion accelerates. However, he says he’ll hang onto one rule: “It’s got to be fun. If it’s not fun, we won’t do it.”