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Is it the wings?

Is it the girls?

Is it ... the owl?

Hooters restaurants are definitely not about owls, so it must be the food and sexy women serving it, with an emphasis on the latter. These elements, along with a rustic decor, goodtime rock 'n' roll and cheap suds add up to attitude, something the founder of the 40-store, $75-million chain has in abundance.

There is already one Hooters in Orlando, one that opened Monday in Altamonte Springs and a third planned for Kirkman Road near Universal Studios later this summer. Additional outlets are in the works for downtown and east Orlando in the coming year.

L.D. Stewart is the brains, brawn and chef behind the fast-growing wing 'n' breast joints that started seven years ago in Clearwater, Fla. and now span the entire Southern region. Tall, dark, handsome and committed to the pursuit of good times, Stewart is a 46-year-old former Army captain who has been a success in most everything he tries: the military, sports, construction, making money, and mass consumption. In Hooters, he has combined them all.

A mighty legend has grown up around how this peculiar restaurant became an accidental, multimillion-dollar, double-barreled cash register.

One Saturday afternoon in 1982, Stewart collected five of his closest pals in Clearwater for a surprise! four-hour drive to Fort Lauderdale to sample chicken wings and beer. Stewart, a contractor by trade, had a job in Lauderdale and was drawn night after night to this same shack, a place called Tarts. He was convinced such a place was needed in Clearwater. Not long after the first road trip, Stewart made another, to Myrtle Beach, S.C., where he sampled the local oyster roast. There was no doubt in his mind now: Stewart and friends Ed Droste, Gil DiGiannantonio, Denny Johnson, Ken Wimmer and Billy Ranieri now known as the Hooters Six were going into the restaurant business.

None of the six had even the remotest experience in the food trade. But to a bull like Stewart, that's nothing more than a temporary inconvenience.

With Stewart as 51% owner (he spent $140,000 to get the doors open) and hands-on builder, the Hooters Six took over a dilapidated shack on Clearwater's main east-west drag. The site once housed "World's Worst Pizza," "Redeye Rock 'n' Roll" and a muffler shop. It was now to be a joint where the sextet could enjoy unlimited beer and Stewart's culinary creations virtually all of the Hooters recipes came from his test kitchen. The Hooters guys the self-proclaimed "Hooter Patrol" for their roaming eyes while cruising Clearwater beaches were unmotivated by making money. They just wanted a place where they couldn't be thrown out.

A lot of other people felt the same way when they entered the first Hooters. Despite limited advertising a single billboard one block from the store featured waitress Lynne Austin and the line, "Fun, fun, fun till Daddy takes your T-bird away" Hooters became an instant sensation. (A quarter of Hooters' $365,000 annual marketing budget in Tampa Bay is now spent on billboards.)

Austin became a bona fide local media celebrity witty, wacky and a wild-eyed innocent and gained national recognition for Hooters when she became Playboy's Miss July 1986. Throughout the South, Austin has become to Hooters what the little girl and her nipping dog are to Coppertone.

Hooters staffed by cheerleader-type waitresses ("We don't hire rocket scientists," says Stewart) with no previous experience and a willingness to wear the uniform of clinging Hooters T-shirt and tight orange short shorts popped up overnight throughout the Tampa Bay area and were profitable from day one. A restaurant near Tampa Stadium will gross $3-million in 1990; the average Hooters sells half that amount. Hooters also ventured into Tampa Stadium in 1990 with two concession stands and the company expects to be high-profile at Tampa's Super Bowl XXV in January.

"They're very adept at finding the right location and fitting it to their motif and concept," says Bob Green, president of Ground Up Associates, a restaurant development and management firm based in Coral Gables. "As a concept, it's an incredible winner, bound for continued growth. One of the things I'm impressed with is as they've grown, each new restaurant is as good as the last. I expect big things from them."

Despite the spoof on women's breasts in everything the stores do, Hooters attracts a cross-section of suit-and-ties at lunch, retirees and families in the afternoon and at dinner and 18- to 25-year-olds after dark. The restaurants are also magnets for athletes and entertainers.

"Anybody that tries to do business at Hooters is going to be disappointed," according to Stewart. "I've never seen it done. I've never been able to do it. But it's a good place to go after a big deal." He says his restaurants are a good place to discover if a business partner "drinks beer or iced tea."

The Tampa Bay area is overrun with copycats Knockers, Melons, Naughty's, Mugs & Jugs, Bumpers and Fraternity House who have bogarted the shapely waitresses in limited apparel, rock 'n' roll and hot wings from the original.

"But it's more complex than that," says Stewart. "None have achieved our dollar volume. Hooters isn't a textbook thing. It's a mood, a feeling, an atmosphere. You can put the components there but you've still got to have the magic. I can give you a list of things to do and it still wouldn't succeed."

Enter the professionals.

Bruce Addinger spent a decade with the leading fern-bar restaurant chain of the late '70s and '80s, Bennigans. He knew hot and smelled a rosebud-colored winner in Hooters. "I liked the product," he recalls. "I liked the rustic decor, casual atmosphere and the upbeat feeling. I found myself staying there for hours." Addinger first thought to open his own knock-off chain in Atlanta, which he would have called J.J. Wingers. Simultaneously, the Hooters Six were scouting for someone who could take them national and were introduced to Addinger.

Neighborhood Restaurants of America now Hooters of America was organized by Addinger to study and nationalize Hooters in 1984. From its Atlanta corporate headquarters, Addinger, 42, oversees the creation of training manuals, films and attitude adjustment formulas to produce new restaurants that retain the founder's gonzo mischievousness.

Hooters of America Chairman of the Board Bob Brooks owner of Atlanta-based Eastern Foods, a supplier of salad dressing to Delta Air Lines owns the majority share of the national franchising company. The Hooters Six collect a 3% royalty on sales in the stores and also own a large piece of the company. Addinger holds the remainder.

How did the company president rationalize the standard 36-24-36 formula in company manuals?

"I didn't interpret (Hooters) as breasts when I got involved," says Addinger. "It was an owl with the name around it. It can be as offensive as you want to make it. To me, it's the quality of the food, the service. And 'Hooters' had a nice ring to it."

As its locations have multiplied, so has the chain's total buying power among chicken wholesalers, although no one supplier can satisfy Hooters' awesome craving for wings, which can reach 3 tons per restaurant, per week. (There are 10 wings in a pound, if you're feeling mathematically inclined.) "There's a lot of doubled-amputated chickens running around," jokes Addinger.

Merchandising accounts for at least a nickel of every dollar spent at Hooters. Products began with simple T-shirts bearing either "You'll love our Hooters," "More than a mouthful" or "Delightfully tacky, yet unrefined" and have expanded to include bikinis, towels, underwear, hats, sweatpants, a magazine, clocks and a children's line of "Life Begins at Hooters" clothing. The annual Hooters calendar sells 50,000 copies and grew into video form this summer. Some of the restaurants now have mini-boutiques.

Addinger has pinpointed the Hooters market as being concentrated in the 25-to-44 age range. "We don't position ourselves as a college market. We're looking for the out-of-college group. I find having a high density of office and business space nearby is important for lunch," he says. "It's group participation food," says Addinger. "You get wings, another guy gets oysters, another gets shrimp. It's, 'Hey let me try that!'"

It is the pros who wind up taking lessons from the Hooters Six, not vice versa.

"Some of the hardest people we've had to train are people that have gone through a formal restaurant background. They have to un-learn a lot of things," says Stewart. The Hooters Six has never hired consultants to help run their piece of the operation. "We've had a lot of free advice," says Stewart. "But we pretty much do things the way we want to do them."

Addinger doesn't argue with Stewart's assessment of the value of amateurs over pros in this instance. To a point.

"You look at the success the Hooters Six had they knew what they wanted," he says. "They were able to impose their will. The advantage they have is that all five Tampa Bay area restaurants are within 45 minutes of their offices. The challenge of multi-units is having the same quality in Nashville as in Atlanta. Training becomes so much more important when you have remote units. In Tampa Bay, if something's wrong, the Hooters Six can jump in their cars and fix it."

Any fears that Hooters' wing 'n' breast concept would be a short-lived fad seems to be passing as the national company presses ahead with one new restaurant each month and talk of going public in the next few years.

"You get a bonus when you eat there," says Harold Schumacher, one-time Atlanta Journal & Constitution restaurant critic and now a commercial real estate broker specializing in restaurants. "Affordably priced food and nice-looking girls are not something guys are going to give up any time soon. They're proven winners."

end

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