Chain Leader

Lane Cardwell

Eye-talian Restaurants
February 11, 2008

In this era of increasingly sophisticated customer awareness of what good food is, why do we still have restaurant chains that think they can slide by with Eye-talian food? In my simple mind there are two types of places that serve the food of Italy: Italian restaurants and Eye-talian restaurants.

Italian restaurants make an effort to keep it as real as possible given the limitations of trying to serve the cuisine of another country in this country. It might be something as upscale as Il Molino, Babbo’s or Rao’s, all in New York. Or something as downscale as your local neighborhood Italian-American eatery. If they are using good quality ingredients, making their sauces fresh and putting out a full flavored rendition of anything from Italy, they are Italian in my book. Maggiano’s Little Italy and Carrabba’s are great chain examples.  And anything that Cameron Mitchell touches. I even grudgingly, given my Brinker roots, have been forced to admit that Olive Garden is a full-fledged Italian restaurant with an eye on authenticity and flavor. Their customer knows it. At about $5 million per unit you should admit it too.

Eye-talian restaurants don’t even bother to try. Their food has many of the same names as their Italian restaurant counterparts but none of the taste and none of the effort. Their sauces usually come in the back door and their ingredients are lovingly selected by the controller for their ability to deliver a low cost of sales and a great labor cost. Mama mia! Now that’s a spicy P & L!

I’m not going to name names because I have many friends working in Eye-talian concepts, and I don’t have so many friends that I can afford to lose any over a blog. Besides, you already know the concepts that I am thinking of. So do they. And, worst of all, so does the customer.

How does this happen? Well, not surprisingly, no one sets out to create an Eye-talian chain. If they did it wouldn’t be a chain, at least not a very big one. The Darwinian restaurant marketplace usually kills these weaklings off when they are young. What usually takes place is a metamorphosis from Italian to Eye-talian that happens over many years as the chain grows. It happens when the leadership of the brand stop listening to their guests, stop learning about the food of a wonderful culinary country, and start trying to make money the old-fashioned way: stealing it from the plate.

It’s not the only foreign cuisine to be treated this way.  We’ll talk about Max-ican restaurants some other day. The ones that try to max-imize their profits by cheapening the food of Mexico. I’m too depressed to write about it right now.

Posted by Lane Cardwell on February 11, 2008 | Comments (1)