Bobby’s Burgers by Bobby Flay, a fast-casual burger restaurant chain from the celebrity chef, held a grand-opening event for its first traditional unit in Charlotte, N.C., on Wednesday.
“I think that Charlotte is a great American city,” said Flay of the new unit’s location. The store will serve as headquarters, training center, and test kitchen for the brand as it moves further into the franchising space.
“This is going to be where we do R&D, where we will bring people who potentially want to franchise Bobby’s Burgers, to this place where they can see the neighborhood location,” Flay said.
The unit, which opened with a soft launch on July 6, is in an office complex in the city’s SouthPark area. The chain’s seven other locations are all inside casinos (Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Atlantic City, N.J.), stadiums (Yankee Stadium in New York), and airports (Phoenix), but streetside restaurants and franchising are going to be a priority going forward.
“It’s something that I take very, very seriously,” Flay said. “We’re full steam ahead for franchising. That’s been our focus. We feel like we have this concept in an incredibly good place in terms of flavor and operation, and now we’re really ready to start taking on more franchising opportunities.”
None of the chef’s other restaurants have ever launched franchising programs. For Bobby’s Burgers, franchising partners have already signed on for the state of Colorado and the Chicagoland area.
“One of the hardest things about franchising is being able to be consistent and grow in such a way that the quality stays… It’s an easy thing to say and a hard thing to do,” Flay said.
One way Bobby’s Burgers is ensuring consistency across all units is with the help of back-of-house technology. At the National Restaurant Association Show in May, vice president of operations Patric Knapp told NRN about the brand’s investment in stovetops with buttons that cooks can press to automatically cook a patty to medium or well-done.
“We’re fast casual but we cook everything to order,” Knapp said. “The equipment cooks to our prescribed method every single time.”
Flay’s involvement is primarily in the kitchen.
“These are all my things,” he said. “My burgers, my recipes, my shakes, from start to finish. There’s no one creating these foods except me.
“What I’m doing is, I’m lending my skills, which are obviously as a chef, to make sure that the food quality stays the way it is, continues to evolve with the time as it needs to.”
The menu, which includes seven burgers, sides like fries and onion rings, a chicken sandwich, a veggie burger, and shakes, may evolve seasonally or by region as Bobby’s Burgers expands. The chain also serves breakfast.
“I’ve been cooking professionally for 40 years, and the one thing I can tell you is it never stops,” Flay said. “You can’t ever get to the place where [you say], ‘I’ve got it. Now I can just not worry about it.’ Because that’s the beginning of the end.”
Flay said he makes decisions about what stays and goes on menus over time based on two things: what customers are saying, and cold, hard data. But his gut plays a role, too.
“I don’t always just rely on data because then I feel like we’re just machines,” he said. “As somebody who really loves to cook for a living, that sort of natural feeling of what that brings is really important. So maybe something’s not selling as much as something else on the menu, but if I think it’s a really great thing, I won’t move it.”
Flay’s favorite item on the Bobby’s Burgers menu is the bacon Crunchburger®.
“That’s an original idea that I had when we first started Bobby’s Burger Palace [in 2008],” he said. “[My thought] was, well, ‘I’m a burger guy, I’ve always loved burgers, but how can I improve the classic cheeseburger?’ Tough to do.”
Flay ended up adding a layer of thin, crispy potato chips to the classic burger “so that when you taste it, you’re getting that contrast, that texture, it adds the crunch,” he said. Flay has gone so far as to trademark the term “crunchify®.”
Ultimately, Flay expects his gut to serve him well with Bobby’s Burgers as it has for all his restaurant concepts.
“All my restaurants have always lasted for an incredibly long time, and I expect Bobby’s Burgers to do the same.”
Contact Leigh Anne at [email protected]
