If you have always assumed that every casual chain restaurant has a nerve center and idea laboratory, you’re right and this is what it looks like.Ī group of chefs work on the first floor in the main building, confecting and painstakingly market-testing the next “craveable,” as standout dishes are known. It’s a modern, three-building complex, with more than 35,000 square feet of cubicles, classrooms, test kitchens and roughly 370 very cheerful employees. Last month, for the first time in its 37-year history, this media-shy company allowed a reporter to visit what is officially called the Ruby Tuesday Support Services Center, here in Maryville, just south of Knoxville. Based on the numbers, though, Ruby Tuesday has a long ways to go.” “Ruby’s is trying to break out of that, and Sandy’s point is correct if and when people decide to go back to casual dining, you need to give them a reason to do it. “You ask people in surveys why they chose one casual dining chain over the other and they’ll say, ‘because the line was shorter,’ ” says Ron Paul, the president of Technomic. A side of the creamy mashed cauliflower cost about three times as much. Wall Street began to worry that the company would break its debt covenants, and Ruby Tuesday shares, which traded as high as $33 a few years back, fell to 85 cents in March. With traffic flagging, a war of discounts and specials broke out in the middle of last year, and the chain started offering buy-one-get-one-free deals a k a “Bogos” to get customers in the door. THE company is haunted by the stark metrics of its trade: Ruby Tuesday’s same-store sales are down about 8 percent from last year, when it closed 54 restaurants. But by commencing just before the bust and sticking to its strategy, the company has become an object lesson in recession-era economics, demonstrating both the perils and possible upsides of pushing lobster in an age of chicken pot pie. When Ruby Tuesday began its self-enhancement drive, it hoped merely to join a slightly posher neighborhood, the place where Olive Garden and Outback Steakhouse live. The companies that gave the world such singular creations as riblet platters, Southwestern egg rolls and dessert shooters stay so keenly attuned to our appetites and urges that you could tell the story of our country’s ever-evolving, slightly twisted love affair with food and commerce with a collection of menus from Chili’s, T.G.I. The chain has been trying to transform itself into the fancier, pricier alternative to much larger rivals like Applebee’s just as consumers have been hoarding their dimes. But the recession started right about the time that those faux Tiffany lamps were yanked from the ceilings. If he’d picked any other moment during his years atop this international empire of 896 restaurants, the makeover might have merely been very hard. Beall, then 21, created in 1972 on the campus of the University of Tennessee, where he was a student. The menu is a long way from the burger-and-beer joint that Mr. “Pairs well with Penfolds Koonunga Hill Shiraz,” it says under a picture of the surf and turf. The new menu includes upmarket fare, like lobster tails, and offers suggestions about which wine will work with your dish. Now Ruby Tuesday features leather banquettes and dark varnished wood, and the wait staff is clad in hipster black shirts and black pants. Beall has spent upward of $100 million of his company’s money in a grand, all-consuming campaign to upgrade the brand its food, its service and, most recently, its décor, which for a long time was dominated by faux Tiffany lamps and rummage-sale bric-a-brac. He has summoned this spread because he’s feeling proud.įor the last two years, Mr. But he hasn’t ordered this orgy of meat, seafood and sesame peanut glaze because he’s feeling peckish. Beall (pronounced “bell”) is hardly going to lift his fork. It’s a lot of lunch for two people, especially because Mr.
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