Rio Bravo Courts the Buzz

Rio Bravo Cantina, a Tex-Mex restaurant chain, opened a restaurant in Fayetteville in October 1997 and broke the city’s record for monthly food sales with $361,767.

With sales that high in its first month, Rio Bravo had nowhere to go but down. In 2001, monthly sales averaged $97,657, a 73 percent drop from that first month.

The honeymoon appeared to be over.

But it looked like things were improving in late 2001. The company brought in a new manager, Greg Taylor, who had been working in Little Rock. By the end of the year, monthly sales at Fayetteville’s Rio Bravo were better than the same months of the previous year, although monthly comp sales were down slightly again in February and March of 2002.

But more people were eating at Rio Bravo, and Taylor believes they’ll come back.

The reason Rio Bravo has had more diners is because of an eight-week promotion Taylor initiated in mid-January. He mailed out 5,000 coupons a week for eight weeks offering a free meal to anyone who purchased a meal. Taylor said the promotion cost Rio Bravo about $64,000 in food that was given away.

The purpose of this promotion is to help Rio Bravo shake its Applebee’s reputation.

The original owners of the chain quickly sold it to Applebee’s International Inc., which operates restaurants by that name. In 1999, Applebee’s sold the 66-unit Rio Bravo chain to Chevy’s Inc. of California, and that company changed the name to Rio Bravo Fresh Mex.

With the name change came fresh food, Taylor said.

“Applebee’s was using ‘heat and serve,'” he said. “Everything we do is made from scratch … We do not have a can in the building.

“It’s been tough on ’em here,” he said, referring to Applebee’s. “They had a lot of problems … Any time you change the quality, if you’re not improving it, you might as well get a gun and shoot yourself in the foot.”

In addition to the coupons, Taylor introduced a new menu April 23 that featured more fajitas and American food items such as hamburgers.

He’s also planning a big party for Cinco de Mayo (May 5). Taylor has hired two bands to play outside on the Mexican holiday, which falls on a Sunday, and an acoustic guitarist may be hired to perform inside.

Rio Stats

Rio Bravo had phenomenal sales of $850,986 for its first three months in business (the last three months of 1997), according to city tax records, which don’t include liquor sales.

The buzz was still pretty good throughout the next year.

Since then, many new restaurants have opened in Fayetteville, and somewhere along the way, the Rio Bravo buzz wore off.

Rio Bravo had sales of $1.17 million in 2001. That averages out to $97,657 per month, a considerable drop from monthly sales in 1997.

“We call that our honeymoon period,” Darlene Hersh, director of marketing for Chevy’s, said of the 18 months after a restaurant opens. “Everyone looks at a honeymoon period differently … It’s affected by a lot of things. Before a restaurant opens, people are waiting. They’re watching the building be built. They go and try it, and then it tapers off.”

In 1999, Rio Bravo had sales of $1.83 million, which averages $152,274 per month. Nine months of 1999 would be considered to be after the company’s “honeymoon period,” but sales have continued to decline since then. In 2000, the restaurant had sales of $1.47 million, which amounts to $122,450 a month.

Hersh wouldn’t comment specifically about the 73 percent drop at Rio Bravo in Fayetteville because Chevy’s didn’t own the restaurant when it opened in 1997.

Taylor said sales at Chevy’s Inc. were down by about 11 percent ($30 million) companywide in 2001 when compared with the previous year.