Beef 'O’Brady’s looks to shed its Irish imageBeef 'O’Brady’s looks to shed its Irish image

Beef O’Brady’s wants to de-Irish its concept.

The Tampa, Fla.-based casual dining chain is not an Irish pub — not unless items like Hand-Battered Pickle Chips and Fajitas are Irish now.

Yet the company’s green signs and the shamrocks inside many of its 180 locations as well as the Irish blessing on the menu — not to mention the “O’Brady’s” in the company’s name — tend to give off the Irish pub vibe.

“We’re not an Irish pub, although sometimes we get called an Irish pub,” Chris Elliott, CEO of parent company FSC Franchise Co., said in an interview. “We want to get away from that distorting image.”

“It never went fully Irish. It was always partially Irish.”

FSC, which owns Beefs as well as the 46-unit Brass Tap, recently completed a recapitalization that gave controlling interest to restaurant investment firm CapitalSpring.

The deal includes significant buy-in from FSC’s management. “Management owns a big chunk of the company,” Elliott said. “There’s a lot of skin in the game.”

The deal should enable the company continue with the “reinvention” of Beefs, which includes the acquisition of some franchise-owned locations, as well as continued fine-tuning of Brass Tap.

Beef’s has been slowly acquiring franchisee units since Elliott came on board seven years ago. The chain at that time had no company locations. Today it has 13. Franchisees own the rest. 

Elliott said the company plans to continue picking up some franchisee outlets “at attractive multiples” while it also works to consolidate its franchisee base. The company has 156 different franchisees, meaning the typical operator owns just a single unit.

That can be a challenge, both for franchisees in an increasingly high-cost environment, as well as for a franchisor who has to deal with numerous different operators.

“There’s a lot of opportunity to help guys to some multi-unit stuff,” Elliott said. “We think that’s a more efficient way to run the brand long-term.”

The addition of corporate stores, meanwhile, enables the company to start testing a new design, one that evolves both the company’s image as well as its kitchens.

Beef’s is working on a reimage, with hopes to have a prototype open by the end of the year to enable the company to gather data. That image will bring the company forward, Elliott said, while working to shed some of that Irish pub image.

“I don’t know that you can completely de-Irish the brand,” Elliott said. “It’s kind of a sense people have had for a long time. But in the reimaging, the stores won’t have shamrocks, there won’t be an Irish blessing, and there won’t be green paint.”

Inside, the company also hopes to bring the chain’s kitchens into the future. “We’re operating with the same kitchen we had in 1985,” Elliott said.

“The caliber of equipment is going to be significantly better. It’ll produce a more consistent and higher quality product and also speed up service.” He also said it would enable the chain to develop new menu items.

“It’s really taking a mom-and-pop brand and putting a lot of muscle in that will help us be more competitive with the larger companies we compete with,” Elliott said.

Yet Beef’s is already fairly competitive. While the chain’s estimated unit volumes fell in 2016, they had increased in each of the five years before that, Elliott said. That includes a 3-percent increase in 2015, according to NRN Second 100 data.

“I look at Beef O’Brady’s and I see only one casual dining brand that had higher stacked [same-store sales] growth over the past six years and that was Buffalo Wild Wings,” Elliott said. “We had five years of positive comps. We went negative in 2016 and are about flat in 2017, but we’ve outperformed our category for the last six years.”

The chain, Elliott said, opted to focus on its strengths several years ago as it sought to compete with chains like Applebee’s, Buffalo Wild Wings and Chili’s.

“In a small brand like Beef O’Brady’s, we’re going to have to play to our strengths, which is community, value, food quality and sports,” Elliott said. “We’ve been relentless in the last few years, and it’s starting to pay off, particularly on the value side.”

One such value strategy the company implemented, for instance, was to sell burgers for $5.99 every Monday. It’s not an everyday discount, but it helped to generate traffic on an otherwise weak day. While they cut the price of the item, profits on that day actually increased.

The company has since done that with other products, such as Taco Tuesday and Wing and Pizza Wednesday.

“We found clever ways to provide a significant amount of value without smaller portions or lesser quality,” Elliott said. “You can’t cut portions and stick a lower price on it and expect people to respond to it. You have to do it in a way to maintain margins.

“I wouldn’t sell burgers for $5.99 every day, but I could do it on a Monday, and get Monday in good shape.” 

Contact Jonathan Maze at [email protected]

Follow him on Twitter: @jonathanmaze

Correction: Aug. 18, 2017 An earlier version of this story misstated the number of Brass Tap restaurants. The chain has 46 units.