FB Society — formerly known as Front Burner Restaurants — is the restaurant group behind such successful concepts as Rockfish Seafood Grill, Twin Peaks, and Velvet Taco. However, unlike most restaurant groups, the Dallas-based FB Society does not collect successful brands.
Instead, it incubates restaurant concepts, provides resources for growth, and helps its most successful brands fly the nest either on their own or to new owners. Rockfish, Twin Peaks, and Velvet Taco, for example, have all been sold off over the past four years.
“When the brands get to a large size, when you get into the nuts and bolts of running them, it becomes a grind — you have to talk labor every day and start tracking commodities and worrying about next quarter’s margin,” FB Society chairman Randy DeWitt said. “That's how we know it's time to sell the business. Right now, we have companies that are in growth mode, and we’re working on knowing where the white space is in the market today, where’s the consumer going, and what’s the most exciting technology.”
DeWitt and FB Society CEO Jack Gibbons will be at CREATE: The Event for Emerging Restaurateurs discussing the company’s role as a growth incubator, how FB Society works differently than a traditional restaurant group, and how the company runs its food halls — including the upcoming New York City food hall, which will be open by summer 2025.
Currently, FB Society has two food halls in Plano, Texas and Nashville, Tenn. The point of these food halls is to act as an incubator for interesting emerging concepts that would not otherwise have the funding to open on their own in a traditional brick and mortar restaurant.
“The mission of our food hall company is to give others the opportunity to create and to grow,” Gibbons said. “Since there’s so much support here, it’s like creating your restaurant on training wheels, instead of having to balance everything when you open a freestanding restaurant. We’re very proud of some of our people that have started in our food halls and now own their own full-service restaurants outside. That’s very rewarding to us.”
In the New York food hall, FB Society plans to only open one new restaurant and a raw bar under its portfolio, but mostly partner with external emerging brands for the rest of the food stalls.
Even if FB Society does not keep its most successful restaurants, they still feel the mission of watching these concepts succeed on their own is a worthy cause.
“Ultimately, what we do is operationalize ideas, and it really gives us the opportunity to share that with the restaurant community, the culinary community, and the entrepreneurial communities of Nashville, Plano, and soon-to-be New York,” DeWitt said.
That does not mean that selling off brands like Twin Peaks and Velvet Taco is easy to recover from, both emotionally and financially.
“Shortly after Jack joined the company, we sold off one of our most successful, largest brands and it was devastating to our infrastructure,” DeWitt said. “We lost so many talented people, and we lost money for the next 18 months because our G&A was too high… so that was a learning experience. You need a core base of operations to pay for the infrastructure that can be leveraged to help scale the promising branch you're, you're growing.”
While Rockfish and Twin Peaks were challenging losses to navigate, especially since they were such a large part of the revenue stream for FB Society, DeWitt said that the third time was the charm and when FB Society sold off Velvet Taco in Nov. 2021, it wasn’t nearly as impactful to the whole organization.
Even though FB Society does not function the same as most restaurant groups, the restaurant group knows a thing to two about how to create and help flourish successful foodservice concepts:
“I think the big thing is it's really easy to fall into this sameness trap,” Gibbons said. “If something's working at one brand that you use it in another. I think we have a lot of discipline of really trying to separate the brands and differentiate them clearly. For us, what success looks like is if a customer walks into Whiskey Cake and doesn’t even recognize that it’s the same ownership as Haywire, then we’ve done our jobs. Saying, ‘oh that’s clearly an FB Society concept’ is an insult to us…because we want our children to grow up and leave the house to be on their own.”
Learn more at the “Tapping Into the Power of Restaurant Groups” Ask the Experts presentation on Oct. 10 at Informa’s CREATE: The Event for Emerging Restaurateurs for emerging restaurant operators in Nashville.
Contact Joanna at [email protected]
