Restaurants are, at their cores, social places for both guests and staffs.

As customers enjoy their meals, cooks, waiters and managers create a community while performing the service choreography of a lunchtime crush or late-night clean-ups.

Youthful staffers share hopes and dreams, wins and losses.

They celebrate rewards. And console failures.

They meet. They marry.

They create deep friendships and second families.

Those bonds became especially deep during the early days of casual dining, and nowhere more so than at the pioneering Steak & Ale concept, created in 1966 by Norman Brinker, who died in 2009.

“The restaurant industry is like no other,” said Mark Paul, now a Dallas-area financial advisor who worked for Steak & Ale. “In those early years, there was a devotion.”

To celebrate those early years of Steak & Ale, the last of which closed when parent Metromedia Restaurant Group filed for bankruptcy liquidation in 2008, former staffers are putting together a two-day reunion to be held Oct. 14-15 at the Westin Galleria in Dallas, complete with reincarnations of the S&A menus, mementoes from the era, and then-and-now audio-visual presentations.

While other restaurant companies, such as Houlihan’s, have had formal full-scale reunions, Steak & Ale has not. The planned Steak & Ale Reunion has already drawn 200 RSVPs, including luminaries from the restaurant management world, and more than a thousand are expected to attend.

A garden of talent
The early Steak & Ale years were something of a finishing school for the burgeoning industry.

Some of the former employees on the S&A Reunion attendance and donation rosters include many from the C-suites of today’s biggest restaurant companies and advocacy groups: Paul Avery of Outback Steakhouse; Rick Berman of Berman and Company; Wally Doolin of Black Box Intelligence; Lane Cardwell, Rick Federico and Rick Tasman of P.F. Chang’s China Bistro; Dick Frank of CEC Entertainment; Curt Glowacki of Mexican Restaurants Inc.; Louis P. Neeb, former chairman of Mexican Restaurants; Hal Smith of the Hal Smith Restaurant Group; and Roger Thomson of Brinker International.

Paul credits Lori Sigwing Olson, who now lives in Tampa, Fla., with proposing the idea initially. Olson put the idea out on Facebook and had 300 hits within a week, Paul said.

Olson was with Steak & Ale for 15 years, starting as a student with her high school’s vocational office educational program in 1980, joining full-time in the accounts receivable department after graduation and leaving in 1995 as supervisor of the accounts payable department.

“First off, let me just say that I’m not the only one who has thought about [a reunion,]” Olson said. “I was just the fool — or brave one — to try to get something together on a bigger scale than what has been done in the past.”

The imprint of casual-dining pioneers like Brinker has stayed with Olson, she said.

“I had always thought about sending a letter to Norman Brinker to tell him what an impact he had on my life.  I was saddened when I saw that he had passed, and one of my first thoughts was, ‘I never sent that letter,’” Olson said. “I will always remember riding up in the elevator with Norman as I was coming to work one afternoon after school.  I was very shy, and I felt trapped in the elevator with him. Norman talked to me during that short ride to the second floor, and during that so-brief period of time I felt like he spoke to me as if I could be a VP for him.”

Her colleagues also made an impression.

“Norman brought the best people to work with him,” she said. “So although I never worked directly for Norman, I did work with the people that he influenced and nurtured.  We all believed in and bought into [Brinker’s often-cited] idea of ‘make work like play, then play like hell.’”

Family ties
Paul, who is also part of the 30-member reunion-organizing team, worked with Steak & Ale from 1968 to 1985. His father was one of the first Steak & Ale developers. After graduating from college, Paul went to Dallas to start the company’s training department. He became training director, and then went into operations at sister casual-dining brand Bennigan’s.

Paul recalls the esprit de corps fostered by being in a brand-new restaurant category.

“A lot of it was spawned and encouraged by the leadership of Norman Brinker in those early years,” Paul said.
The sense of camaraderie was especially intense, he recalled.

“During that period people were so married to the business and people were so dedicated to what they were doing,” Paul said. “It was so unique. With Steak & Ale being the first major dinnerhouse chain, it provided a unique experience. We felt we were like the first. We felt good about it. We were young and meeting our age with a lot of energy. It lent itself to an exciting atmosphere. Those years were just phenomenal.”

Like many in the industry, Paul said he owes much of his professional development and personal happiness to his years at Steak & Ale.

“I met my wife at Steak & Ale,” he said. “She was a hostess in Pittsburgh. So many people met their spouses at Steak & Ale.”
In addition, a team of organizers is recreating the food from Steak & Ale to serve at the event.

“When we opened Steak & Ales, they would clear the furniture out of the restaurant and pass plates of Kensington Clubs, cut into sixths,” Paul said. “And Prince and the Paupers, which were the marinated chicken with pineapple. We’re going to recreate some of the menu for Steak & Ale and for Bennigan’s. We’re trying to bring the experience back.”

Paul said the organizers, which he described as “a talented army,” anticipate between 500 and 1,000 attendees. The committee is working toward a goal of $100,000 in sponsorships and donations to offset the costs of the reunion.

“That way more people can feel like they can come,” he said. “People are paying to fly in and for hotels and such, so if we can pay for the event itself, we want to do that.”

He said any additional funds raised will go to the Susan G. Komen breast-cancer research group that was dear to Brinker’s heart, and the Friedreich’s Ataxia Research Alliance of Springfield, Va., a national nonprofit organization dedicated to education about and research into the neuromuscular disorder.

A tribute to Brinker is planned as well, Paul said. Already the website, www.sarestaurant.myevent.com, has drawn such tributes as: “Norman — you started it all and impacted so many lives. You chose many roles: restaurateur, coach, leader, inspirer. … You influenced an entire generation of food executives by your management style and the restaurant world by introducing the salad bar. You were the greatest.”

Olson said she is not alone in recalling the fun and high energy of her years at Steak & Ale.

“The restaurant industry is inherently fun, has a high energy level, and it’s about taking care of people,” she said. “We all had someone we were supposed to be taking care of. … Getting so many bright, fun, smart, passionate, funny, generous and committed people working under one umbrella is a recipe that never loses.

“One of the things that I think speaks so highly of the company is the interest level in the reunion from so many different areas of the company and from different decades,” she added. “People who worked there 40 years ago have expressed excitement and say how long overdue it is. Our time with the company has stood the test of time.”

Olson said her main goal for the reunion is to “get all these wonderful people under one roof. … I’ve never had the experience of working with such high-caliber people as I did during my time with S&A. Again, we worked hard, and we played hard!”

Contact Ron Ruggless at ronald.ruggless@penton.com.