Toque of the Town: Luby's Buffet Gourmet

Chef Tony Ruppe taps his fine-dining background to increase food quality and create menus for new Luby's concepts.

By Monica Rogers, Contributing Editor -- Chain Leader, 4/1/2003

Chef Tony Ruppe

Luby’s new corporate executive chef, Tony Ruppe, is not easily intimidated. In fact, high-stress restaurant industry scenarios that would send most folks fleeing for the exits have an almost magnetic pull on the man. Take, for example, his very entree into the restaurant industry. Eighteen years old and about to graduate from high school in New Orleans, Ruppe was agonizing about what to do with his future. As he wandered the streets deep in thought, Ruppe says he kept coming back to the same place: the kitchen at Brennan’s restaurant. “It was noisy, bustling, colorful—a fabulous swirl of organized chaos,” says Ruppe. “It was intoxicating.” He was so mesmerized, he would “walk into the kitchen and just stand there taking it all in until somebody threw me out.”

Fed up with Ruppe’s trespassing, owner Ella Brennan finally threatened to call the police. “But then she hesitated and asked me exactly what it was that I wanted,” Ruppe recalls. “I told her that I wanted to do a chef’s apprenticeship in Europe.” Remarkably, Brennan took the youth at his word and provided him with contacts. In months Ruppe was on his way to Zurich, Switzerland, for a year’s training under then-executive chef Herr Bachtold at the Hotel Bellerive Au Loc.

Ruppe has been in the thick of it ever since, working alongside industry talents such as Helmut Sussenbach at Houston’s Hotel Intercontinental and Southwestern cooking impresario Robert McGrath at the Four Seasons Hotel, Houston. He also ran the kitchens at several independent restaurants, including his own namesake fine-dining venue in Houston, before being named top toque at San Antonio-based Luby’s Inc. last year.

From Foie Gras to Liver
While the shift from fine dining to cafeterias—from “foie gras with pear chutney and pomegranate molasses to liver and onions,” as he puts it—may seem a sea change, Ruppe rates working for Luby’s COO and CEO Harris and Chris Pappas as a “golden opportunity.”

“The Pappas brothers truly have the Midas touch when it comes to shaping successful concepts,” says Ruppe, referring to the company’s thriving casual concepts.

To anyone watching from the outside, it appears it will take Midas’ touch to transform the 190-unit Luby’s into a successful operation. The company posted losses of $9.7 million in 2002, partly due to the 37 units it has closed since 2001, but also because of changes in customer eating habits and increased competition from other industry segments. “The sector has been declining for years,” says analyst Bryan Elliott of Raymond James & Associates. “It’s been tough for cafeterias to compete with restaurants that serve alcoholic beverages and food with more intense flavor profiles.”

But for the Pappas regime, which bought into Luby’s in March 2001, 2002 was a year of extensive reconfiguring, testing and rebuilding for the chain. “Strategies are still evolving,” says Laurie Shults, Luby’s marketing director.

A Smorgasbord of Buffets
Thus far, the development of various buffet concepts aimed to drive traffic and bolster breakfast and dinner business has been a big part of the plan. After in-depth analysis of regional distinctions between locations in 11 states, Luby’s shaped three prototypes, all launched last year.

Bob Luby’s Seafood Grill, a seafood concept with food delivered to tables by servers, is meant to compete with casual-dining restaurants. The restaurant, which has what the company calls a “semi a la carte style,” offers entrees ranging from $5 to $12. Luby’s Steak Buffet—all you can eat for $6 to $8—will go head to head with steakhouses. And a third, Luby’s All-You-Can-Eat Buffet, with prices between $6 and $8 depending on location, competes broadly with everything from home-meal replacement to fast food. Thus far, Luby’s has converted 45 of its traditional cafeterias into all-you-can-eat buffets, two into the seafood concept and one into the steak buffet.

Each concept has its own menu, shaped by Ruppe and his 11-member culinary team (an assistant chef and 10 area chefs). Dishes at Bob Luby’s Seafood Grill include Fried Crawfish Po’ Boys, $6.45; Grilled Rainbow Trout, $9.75, with rice and cole slaw; and house specials of Crawfish Étouffée, $6.45, and Shrimp Fettuccine Alfredo, $9.95. Menus for the other two concepts draw largely from the same recipes used for the cafeteria. However, at the steak concept, grilled and smoked meats such as barbecue beef brisket and whole smoked chickens are carved to order, and other foods are served from scatter bars containing bread and desserts, salads and taco fixings, and vegetables and starches. All-you-can-eat lunch costs $6.99; dinner, $7.99.

Ruppe says the Cajun/Creole bent of the food at the seafood venue and southwestern flair of the barbecue are cuisine styles he’s very comfortable with. This is partly because of the many years he served as a chef in New Orleans and Texas, but also because, “I feel as if I was born to do Cajun and Creole dishes,” he says. “I tend to like things that are more intensely flavored and have a passion for sauces, braises, soups, stews and slow-cooked meats.”

In addition to the new concepts, Luby’s added all-you-can-eat specials at its traditional cafeterias in Dallas-Fort Worth and San Antonio, and shaped an all-you-can-eat weekend breakfast buffet at 30 locations in Texas. The special highlights a manager-selected combination at a reduced price. The $5.75 breakfast buffet includes fresh fruits, juices and baked goods, plus breakfast meats and casseroles, and features cooked-to-order waffle and omelet stations. Moving forward, Luby’s says it plans to use the manager’s special as a promotional offer only, but it will expand the breakfast buffet to another 30 units this year.

Driving Traffic
Thus far, all of the buffets have been driving traffic. At its annual meeting Feb. 1, Luby’s reported 18 consecutive weeks of increased customer counts. However, letting customers eat all they want has increased food costs, up from 25.2 percent in 2001 to 25.9 percent in 2002.

And analysts question the wisdom of all-you-can-eat concepts as a long-term strategy.

“It was important for Luby’s to drive traffic, to get people back in to show them that Luby’s has improved,” says Jeff Dabbs, senior vice president and equity analyst for San Antonio-based Kercheville & Company. “But once you get people eating at an all-you-can-eat buffet, it’s very difficult to wean them off of it.”

Dabbs also worries that Luby’s has too many different things happening at different locations. “If I go to a Luby’s in Houston that has an all-you-can-eat buffet, I want to be able to go to another unit somewhere else and get the same thing,” he says.

But Luby’s dismisses such criticisms, saying research supports the segmented approach it’s taking. The company believes systemwide efforts to raise the bar on food quality will bring customers back, “even if traffic-driving incentives such as all-you-can-eat pricing are phased out,” says Shults.

Consistently Better
Ruppe says apart from work on the seafood and steak menus, his energies have been focused on improving the quality of foods for the cafeterias. He and his team just completed a book of 300 newly standardized recipes, including step-by-step procedural photos, last month.

“A lot of these are great recipes, but they go back decades to a time when people cooked a lot more by touch and feel,” he says. “Many were first passed on by somebody’s wife, aunt or mother, written on the back of a beverage napkin or sales receipt, and might specify amounts like a pinch of this or a half cookspoon of that. This is the first time anyone’s gone through and standardized them all.”

Take Pearl Potato Salad. Ruppe remembers reading the recipe with interest, thinking it would be some variation on pommes parisienne, with the potatoes shaped into miniature balls or “pearls” and tossed, perhaps, with a vinaigrette. “But all I could find in the recipe that distinguished it from good, traditional potato salad was the inclusion of a slightly higher amount of mustard and egg,” he says. Puzzled, he researched the recipe a bit more and discovered that it was named not for the shape of the potato pieces, but for the manager’s wife who had first mixed a batch.

Action Station Spotlight
Also with an eye on enhanced quality, Ruppe has been putting greater emphasis on up-to-the-minute food preparation. “We’ve retooled line procedures to reduce the time between orders coming in and food going out so that you almost have an a la carte cooking situation-a little sizzle going out with the food in the pan,” he says.

Ruppe has also added “action stations” to the lines, putting the spotlight on hand-carved meats, such as prime rib and rosemary-rubbed pork roast, and salads tossed to order. For instance, customers watch as line workers toss a salad of mixed field greens with feta cheese and toasted pecans, or prepare Greek salad. “We want to battle the perception that cafeteria food has been cooked and sitting in a hot-box for hours,” he says.

Later this year, Ruppe says, he and his team will be able to turn their focus from retooling existing recipes to development of new ones. “We have an internal goal that once the core recipes are finalized and the pressure is gone on that part of the schedule, we’ll try to develop about 25 new items per quarter,” he says. That means everything from salads, dressings and desserts at the cafeteria to new rubs, mops and marinades for the steak buffet.

He adds, “We also expect to do more to cater to regional tastes, and I’d like to introduce more international flavors, but grounded in comfort, so they don’t alienate people.”