Dallas-based Food Friends & Company operates 17 restaurants in 10 states and is still growing strong. Chairman and CEO Jack Baum, a foodservice veteran who founded Southwestern-themed chain Canyon Cafe, talks to R&I about his multiconcept strategy, the need for differentiation among chains and the keys to staying the course in a time of economic uncertainty.

Q. We’re in the midst of a pretty challenging economic climate. Are you confident that the upscale-casual-dining niche still is a good place to be for the long term?

A. Good economies are going to come and go, and bad economies are going to come and go. The good news is that most people are going to eat between 14 and 21 meals a week, and many of those are going to be out and many of those are going to be in the home, and we’re going to get our fair share.

I will say this: In these type of economies where you have rising oil prices, rising commodity prices, rising labor costs, there is no doubt we’re all going to have to take price increases.

Most people try to camouflage price increases and make sure nobody notices, [but] a more refreshing way to handle it—the way we would want to handle it—would be to have our servers go right up to the table and say: “You might notice we’ve taken a couple of price increases on our menu. Commodity prices and all our costs are going up. We feel like we’re making the best decisions for both you the guest and us, and we want to make sure we maintain the quality you’ve come to expect from us, but we apologize for having to take the price increase.”

Q. Why are so many restaurant companies growing with multiple chain brands instead of building up individual concepts?

A. We’d like to open multiple restaurants in a community, but we want to make sure that we’re not opening the same concept over and over again. So, for instance, when we go into a city like Denver, instead of opening three or four Woodlands [a high-end American grill], we would open a Mexico [Cantina Y Veracruz Cooking], which is our upscale Mexican restaurant; we’d open Woodlands—we have both of those restaurants operating in the Denver market; and then we might also open our pan-Latin bistro called Wapango.

Q. One issue facing casual-dining chains is a perceived lack of differentiation. What’s the trick to providing new experiences to consumers who often don’t like to stray from what’s familiar in their dining choices?

A. There’s this constant balance that has to be put together between what people are comfortable with and what they’re willing to stray outside the norm for. So anybody who thinks they’re going to create a restaurant so unique and different that it’s cutting-edge is probably going to be way ahead of the marketplace, and they’re probably not going to do very well.

Q. How is Red Sails, the restaurant you’re developing in Scottsdale, Ariz., a good example?

A. With Red Sails—which is a project name that will not be the name of the restaurant—we looked at the demand for seafood and realized it’s probably underserved in 90% of the markets we’re going into. So we said, how can we differentiate ourselves?

I thought about the various coastlines in the world, and I said, “Where are interesting cuisines we can pull from?” And we looked at the Mediterranean. Most cuisines [that we see here] from Mediterranean countries have not focused on the coastlines: Spanish tapas; French cuisine; Italian; Greek; Mediterranean cuisine from the Lebanese, Israeli and Egyptian side of things; Moroccan food.

There is a tremendous amount of coastline in those countries, so we looked at their cooking methods and introduced seafood that takes inspiration from the Mediterranean but doesn’t overplay it. Our menu is unique yet comfortable for most people [to order from].

Q. Which menu segment, if any, is still underserved in the multi-unit restaurant arena?

A. Believe it or not, white-tablecloth seafood, even though there are some wonderful players [in that segment]. That’s No. 1.

No. 2, you have to go to specific cities and see where voids are in the market. [Despite] the tremendous growth over the last 10 to 15 years in the restaurant industry, you’re still seeing a lot of growth. More and more restaurants are going to be pulling from a smaller radius. We need to be thinking about a three-to-five-mile radius as opposed to a 10-to-20-mile radius. So you really need to be very local and really look at each market and each demographic to answer that question.

Contact writer at aperlik@reedbusiness.com