A Bloomin’ Movement
The communities of Silicon Valley are trying to eliminate crime, unaffordable housing … and the carbohydrate. Searching University Avenue for a tasty meal of respectable portion size, I find only expensive salad outposts that feature every topping imaginable — provided your imagination doesn’t include cheese with fat, dressing with cream, or a crouton with gluten. Nestled between two overpriced cafés that offer every form of milk (except that from a cow) is a shuttered Cheesecake Factory, an ode to a time when butter came with bread (and iconic bread at that).
I tried to stay strong and adapt to this anti-carb culture. But after a brutal three-hour accounting midterm, I snapped. I hauled myself, alone, to a Chili’s a few yards beyond Palo Alto city limits for the signature chocolate-chip cookie skillet. I returned to campus, ashamed of having sat alone downing multiple days’ worth of calories. But upon my arrival, my roommate Ian Kennedy greeted me with envy and asked why I had not towed him along.
And so the GSB Chain Restaurant Club was born. Ian and I soon realized that many GSB classmates shared our craving for an escape from minuscule portion sizes at outrageous prices. So our 178 members (almost half the Class of 2020) dine at the restaurants that line America’s highways and malls — Outback, Chili’s, Texas Roadhouse and, yes, The Cheesecake Factory, to name a few. We adhere to two rules:
- We define a chain restaurant as any casual dining concept with multiple locations and waiter service. This can range from your neighborhood Applebee’s to your scandalous Hooters. We have the utmost respect for our cousins, the fast-casual and fast-food dining concepts (i.e., Subway, Chipotle, McDonald’s), but we believe casual chain dining offers the unique opportunity to bring people together for a sit-down meal.
2. We cringe, even more than when served a flourless chocolate cake, at the phrase “Wow, I’m surprised this is actually good.” Several newcomers to our nation’s largest dining establishments have uttered these words upon savoring a deeply fried bloomin’ onion at Outback or the sizzling fajitas at Chili’s. Is it a coincidence that Chili’s outnumbers Sweetgreen 21 to 1 in the United States? We think not. Americans want quality food at quality prices. As shrewd business students, we should recognize that the restaurants that dot suburbia are, in fact, quite tasty.
We at the Chain Restaurant Club know that a GSB club makes a name for itself by attracting noteworthy speakers to compete with the tech icons and investing legends. Danny Gold, our third co-founder, and I were in pursuit of one such target: the chairwoman of Bloomin’ Brands (parent company of Outback). I launched a persistent outreach campaign, aided by Chain Restaurant Club enthusiast Alexis Wise, reiterating that every birthday apart from my bar mitzvah had been marked at the Outback off Route 46 in Parsippany, N.J. Lo and behold, Liz Smith, a GSB alumna and proud parent of a Stanford freshman, agreed to meet the Chain Restaurant Club at — where else? — an Outback Steakhouse.
This is where true management lessons were learned. When the regional management team of Outback raced to quickly prepare the restaurant for our last-minute meal with Liz, they did not merely supervise the local waiters, bartenders, and busboys. They donned aprons to help cook, refill drinks, and serve meals in their hot, caloric glory. We watched the Chairwoman gracefully excuse herself from cocktails with the future leaders in our MBA class to head to the kitchen and compliment the employees on their impeccable service and shiny new countertop. This is how to lead.
We reflected with Liz about what attracted her to the casual dining industry. She noted the pride of being a leader of an organization where it is still possible for a dishwasher to work his or her way up to a regional manager or franchise owner. This story rang true from my own experiences dining at Outback. Kevin, the busboy who served my filet mignon off the children’s menu, rose up to be our family’s waiter, and then went on to manage our local Outback by the time I was bringing dates to the restaurant.
With our remaining time at the GSB, we are working to usher in a new class of casual dining enthusiasts. Upon graduation, we will shift our attention to an even greater challenge — changing the conventional business meal setting from a stuffy restaurant that drains corporate expense accounts to a quality chain dining outpost. Cheers to the deals we’ll close over a celebratory bloomin’ onion.
