Chain Leader

David Farkas

Quality Control
September 28, 2006

Here’s an interesting list I wanted to use in a recent cover story but didn’t have room for it. It shows that—with all due respect to the French—the more things change, the more they improve, at least when it comes to Italian chains.

In 2000 Technomic Inc. ranked the category’s casual-dining players thusly according to sales:

1. Olive Garden, $1.5 billion

2. Romano’s Macaroni Grill, $419 million

3. Pizzeria Uno, $318.4 million

4. Carrabba’s Italian Grill, $170 million

5. Bertucci’s, $47.5 million

6. Maggiano’s, $97.8 million

7. Il Fornaio, $92.3 million

8. The Old Spaghetti Factory, $81 million

9. Buca di Beppo, $71.5 million

10. Spaghetti Warehouse, $69 million

Last year, the Chicago-based market-research firm offered this list of rankings for 2005:

1. Olive Garden, $2.4 billion

2. Romano’s Macaroni Grill, $755 million

3. Carrabba’s Italian Grill, $580 million

4. Johnny Carino’s Italian, $316.2 million

5. Maggiano’s, $311 million

6. Buca di Beppo, $239 million

7. Bertucci’s, $211.5 million

8. Il Fornaio, $132.6 million

9. Bravo Cucina Italiana, $115 million

10. The Old Spaghetti Factory, $97.2 million

What’s interesting to me isn’t that two players have fallen off the ’05 list. Actually, it’s only one; the other, Pizzeria Uno (now called Uno’s Chicago Grill), was placed in Technomic’s “varied menu” category.

What’s intriguing is that the two new chains—Johnny Carino’s and Bravo—are upscale restaurants. That tells me the category, when looking at the biggest players, is now trading on quality instead of quantity. And quantity, interestingly enough, is what established the category in the first place.

Posted by David Farkas on September 28, 2006 | Comments (0)