Chains Take Top 10 Slots

For the first time since the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal began tracking Fayetteville restaurant sales in 1997, the top 10 slots are all held by national chains.

(Click here to see the restaurants chart.)

Historically, locally owned Jose’s Inc. has been in the top five. But Joe Fennel sold Jose’s Mexican Restaurant to Neal Crawford last year. Fennel kept Bordino’s Italian restaurant, which was part of Jose Inc.

Since Fennel’s two restaurants were housed in the same Dickson Street building, and because he wouldn’t divulge separate sales figures for them, the Business Journal counted Jose’s and Bordino’s as one business. But now they are two, according to the city’s hotel-motel-restaurant tax collections.

Jose’s Mexican Restaurant, incorporated as Dickson Dining LLC, brought in $700,300 in gross sales for the first six months of fiscal 2005, which began in December 2004. Bordino’s sales were $619,600 during the same period. Fennel and two partners are currently in the process of moving Bordino’s to a new building on Dickson Street.

But even if added together, those sales numbers are well below the city’s leader, Olive Garden, which had $1.96 million in sales during the same time period. Red Lobster was second with $1.75 million.

Three restaurants that opened in the last half of fiscal 2004 took the next three slots: Golden Corral with $1.71 million, Smokey Bones Barbecue with $1.47 million and Logan’s Roadhouse with $1.42 million. The Taco Bell on U.S. Highway 62 inched into the No. 10 spot with $964,300 in sales.

“We just try to give a great dining experience to everybody all the time,” said Cory Morris, kitchen manager at Golden Corral.

Besides Jose’s, the newcomers also knocked Ryan’s Family Steakhouse (now named Fire Mountain) and Ruby Tuesday out of the top 10. They had sales of $2.13 million and $1.99 million, respectively, for calendar 2004.