FSR August 2022

On the Rise

were halted due to COVID. The exterior had already been constructed, but the inside wasn’t finished. Buffett’s team agreed to hold the space, as long as the restaurant opened by May of this year. Plew describes the shopping center as a rural market witnessing an accelerated transition. He can see several construc tion cranes across the street from the Dal las Cowboys practice facility and another set near the so-called headquarters row, which includes companies like Liberty Mutual and Toyota North America. “What’s happened is all those employ ees came from Southern California,” Plew says. “And so they have started to meld and make this area less country-rural and transition into a more contemporary area.” In addition to the new marquee loca tion, Thirsty Lion has nine other units across Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, and Texas. A second two-story restaurant and rooftop bar is scheduled to open in Glendale, Arizona, in January 2023. This forthcoming store will total 9,800 square feet, with patios on both

“They’re not inexpensive to build, but they do high volume,” Plew says. “And what’s nice about it is we won’t even open the upstairs at lunch. So you can be smaller and look like a cool, hip, small restaurant at lunch, and then when you need to be big, you open and go big. The

dium—that can fulfill the restaurant’s large capacity. In addition to these big ger units, Thirsty Lion is leveraging a smaller, single-story prototype that had its square footage sliced by roughly 1,000 square feet to reduce overhead and construction costs.

KATHY TRANS / THIRSTY LION

THIRSTY LION EMBRACES ITS PUB ROOTS WITH ELEVATED COMFORT FOODS LIKE THE SPANISH CHILAQUILES (TOP) AND TV-FILLED BAR AREA.

The idea is to build both of these store designs in clusters. After Thirsty Lion finishes in Texas (two more to come in Dallas suburbs Addison and Preston Hollow), it will jump to the Southeast, where it could potentially establish 2–3 stores in Atlanta and two more in Char lotte and Raleigh, North Carolina. The goal is to build one restaurant to service 750,000 to 1 million customers and about 4–5 locations for every 5 mil lion customers—remaining consistent with Thirsty Lion’s anti-chain mindset. “We don’t like to build too many units in markets because then we look like a Fridays chain or something,” Plew says. “What we’re doing is [targeting] every body’s sense of touch, the visual, the taste, the smell, and the audible. And when you work them all together, it’s a lot more powerful.”

levels and seating for 400. The second floor will also include an open-air din ing area and a large outdoor bar with plenty of room for larger parties. Less than a mile from State Farm Stadium, home of the Arizona Cardinals football team, Thirsty Lion has an enviable loca tion, especially considering it will debut about a month before the stadium hosts the Super Bowl.

rooftop has views and its own bar and experience, and you can sell those pri vate parties.” The ambitious Texas and Arizona locations likely won’t be the last of their kind, but Thirsty Lion plans to be selec tive in where it establishes future out lets of that magnitude. Locations must be placed in a highly trafficked area— such as near a concert venue or sta

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FSRMAGAZINE.COM

AUGUST 2022