President Roland Dickey Jr. says he expects Dickey’s Barbecue to open about 58 restaurants this year thanks to a new fast-casual format. Read or listen to a downloadable extended interview with Dickey.

How is your new prototype different than your current stores?

Well we've seen the growth in the fast-casual segment, which has just been explosive over the last decade, and our older stores were more of a buffet format. And so we have evolved to be just a more mainstream fast casual—order at the counter, get a number and get a cup, and we bring the food to the table—as we expand all over the country. [On Dec. 11] we opened two stores in Virginia and one store in Dover, Del., for instance, to a great response, a line out to the sidewalk. People want barbecue. They want good, fast-casual barbecue. There's just not much of it around the country, which is kind of the unique opportunity for us.

We've evolved over the decade certainly, and we make choices between sticking to the core values that make us great and also staying with the times, and that's a management call. We want to make sure that we stay relevant, stay ahead of the times, and so that's why we continue to make modifications.

Now we're not going in, we're not changing our recipes. We're not really changing the look and feel of the restaurant that much. But we're always trying to tweak it to make it not only stay with the times but also to improve our stores' profitability. And I believe that our company will always be in a state of continuous innovation and improvement.

What are some of the elements that no matter what tweak, this is what Dickey's is?

Dickey's Barbecue is the New South. You talk about the regional preferences with barbecue. They're mostly grouped in the Southern United States. We're a Southern barbecue concept. What we are is the New South. What we are not is the Old West. And so you don't walk in our restaurants and you don't see wagon wheels and lariats on the wall. It's a very clean environment. And so what we want to do in our concept is take Southern barbecue in a fast-casual way to all parts of the country, making barbecue mainstream and also making it family oriented.

Are families your main demographic?

Families are our main demographic. We have a professional crowd at lunches Monday through Friday, but nights and weekends are dominated by families. Our business model is also home meal replacement, and we sell things called family packs and bulk orders, pounds of meat and gallons of vegetables, and it's very big with barbecue, as is catering. And delivery for Dickey's is huge.

What does Dickey's look like, say, in five years?

We want to have over 500 restaurants open, and we think that's a very attainable goal, but we certainly don't measure our success just by store counts. If you don't have a solid foundation, you don't need to keep expanding. Today our same-store sales are up 4.4 percent, and we think that's a very healthy number. If that was a negative 4.4 percent, we would stop the growth and figure out what we were doing wrong with our existing stores.