July 2003 Top Story
Aces in our industry
Behind the scenes of knockout seafood retail displays and inspired seafood menus are buyers who manage thousands of critical details while still focusing on their company’s mission. The best buyers make it look easy — but we all know it’s not.
Two such buyers are Denise Englade, seafood specialist for Town & Country Markets in Seattle, and Tim Curci, co-founder and VP of purchasing and menu development at Bonefish Grill in Tampa, Fla.
SeaFood Business is proud to feature Englade and Curci in our annual spotlight on seafood buyers who rise above the standard to deliver an exceptional seafood experience to the consumer and notable results to their company’s bottom line.
Englade helped design a premiere seafood department at Town & Country’s Central Market store that contributes an average of 8 percent to the store’s total sales and 10 percent during special promotions.
She leads a staff of six managers in buying by consensus so that they can sell products they believe in and run departments that are profit centers in their own right.
Curci, a Culinary Institute of America-trained chef and experienced restaurateur, surveyed the crowded dining landscape and saw a need for a slick but comfortable seafood dining concept.
After opening the first location in January of 2000, Bonefish Grill, featuring fresh, grilled fish with creative sauces, is marching from Florida into middle America with the backing of Outback Steakhouse, a powerhouse restaurant company. With 16 to 20 new locations planned this year, Bonefish Grill is Outback’s fastest-growing concept.
Not bad for Curci, a guy who up until a few years ago knew lots more about steaks and burgers than finfish and shellfish and had to figure out how to buy, portion and handle seafood in a way that could be easily replicated all over the country.
Hats off to Englade and Curci.
Tim Curci
Bonefish Grill’s VP of purchasing delivers fresh
grilled fish at a fast-growing chain
Tim Curci, co-founder and VP of purchasing and menu development for Bonefish Grill, drew on his culinary training and restaurant operations background to learn how to be an effective seafood buyer for the successful, fast-growing casual seafood chain. This year, Curci expects to purchase $13.75 million worth of seafood to satisfy Bonefish diners.
Curci and partner Chris Parker opened their first Bonefish Grill, featuring fresh, grilled fish, in January 2000 in St. Petersburg, Fla. Since then, Bonefish Grill’s annual sales have grown to nearly $77 million, representing about $3.2 million in average unit volume.
Last year, Curci and Parker struck a 50/50 joint venture partnership with Outback Steakhouse that has helped to grow the chain to its current 24 restaurants, half of which are outside Florida.
A total of 16 to 20 new locations are planned for this year, making Bonefish Grill Outback’s fastest-growing concept.
Curci, a Culinary Institute of America-trained chef, developed the core menu of seven grilled fresh fish species — Atlantic swordfish, Atlantic salmon, mahimahi, Gulf grouper, ahi tuna, Chilean sea bass and rainbow trout.
Each species comes with a choice of three sauces: lemon butter, lime tomato garlic and fresh mango salsa. The menu also features such specialty dishes as prosciutto-wrapped monkfish.
Curci’s restaurant career began when he was 15 years old as a dishwasher at Brubaker’s, a family restaurant in Lexington, Ky.
He worked his way up through the kitchen, then worked for Rafferty’s, an upscale casual-American restaurant in Lexington, before attending the CIA and graduating in 1987.
The following year, Curci arrived in Tampa, Fla., to re-open the restaurant at the Clearwater Beach Hotel and after that joined Hops Restaurant Bar and Brewery.
Curci and Parker worked together as operations executives at Hops and, during the 1990s, helped grow that chain from 18 to 60 restaurants. They then looked to seafood for their own entrepreneurial adventure.
They saw an opportunity in the foodservice industry for a hybrid seafood restaurant chain that combined the slickness and creativity of a white-tablecloth seafood establishment with the comfort of a seafood shack.
“ We felt like there was an opportunity in polished-casual seafood,” says Curci. “It bridges the gap between expensive high-end and rustic, basket-food places. We felt like there was a good niche there.”
To realize their vision, Parker and Curci had to teach themselves to be as familiar with buying, handling, cooking and serving seafood as they were with steak and beer while at the Hops Brewery.
“ Chris and I cut fish for the first year and a half ourselves every day before we started to grow because we really wanted to understand it,” says Curci.
They set up a partnership with Dunedin Fish, in Dunedin, Fla., to deliver fresh fillets to the first Bonefish Grill in St. Petersburg. Curci and Parker would de-bone and break the fish down into portions to minimize cost.
They focused on how to best cut the fillet and accept some waste, rather than create menu dishes that exist only to absorb scraps.
“ We wanted to come up with a system of how to cut and store the product so it maintains its integrity from the time it gets to the back door to the time it is served to the guest,” says Curci.
Curci’s goal was to establish systems so that the concept could be handed off to competent operators who weren’t necessarily longtime seafood experts.
The system Curci originally set up calls for partnering with a fresh-fish vendor in the markets in which Bonefish operates. Dunedin, for example, under Curci’s daily guidance, purchases and delivers the fresh fish for Bonefish’s Florida restaurants and it is portioned in-house.
Bluefin, a company in Louisville, Ky., delivers fresh fish to the restaurants in that city, three in Indianapolis and one in Cincinnati. Restaurants order fresh fish as they need it, and the vendor/partners purchase according to the patterns of the restaurant’s needs.
“ We develop what we consider to be a partnership with them and not just a vendor/client relationship,” says Curci. As Bonefish Grill enters each new market, it will seek a fresh fish vendor in that market.
All of the frozen product — lobster, shrimp, scallops and crab — used at Bonefish is purchased through Outback to take advantage of the buying power of the large restaurant company.
Bonefish purchases a small portion of its fresh fish through Performance Food Group, a broadline distributor in Richmond, Va.
Curci’s fresh fish distribution system continues to be effective as Bonefish expands. There are now 12 restaurants in Florida, three in Indiana, three in North Carolina, two in Virginia, one in Louisville, one in northern Kentucky, one in Ohio and one in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
As Bonefish has expanded outside of Florida, it has enjoyed a warm reception. The Indianapolis Star, for example, applauded Bonefish for its lack of the cheesy hallmarks typically signifying a chain restaurant — loud music, rushed service and overdone theme — and praised the food as “competent and, at times, striking.”
While handling the operational aspects of seafood buying and distribution, Curci has certainly not forgotten his culinary development roots. Curci is captivated by all the possibilities of seafood, which inspires him to create new menu items like a Grouper Oscar served with asparagus, lump crab and lemon butter.
“ With seafood, people are a little more adventurous. The more fun you make it, the more you like it, the more interesting things you bring in, the more they like it.”
Denise Englade
“ Build it big and they will come” is Town & Country’s
seafood motto
Denise Englade’s approach to buying seafood for the six Town & Country markets in the greater Seattle area may drive suppliers crazy, but it’s one important reason the chain’s seafood departments are successful.
Each of Town & Country’s four full-service seafood departments generate between 3.8 percent and 8 percent of store sales. Seafood sales at the chain’s Central Market concept, which features a large seafood department at the front of the store, continue to increase by double digits over the previous year.
Before Seafood Specialist Englade purchases a new product for Town & Country, it must impress not only her, but her staff of six department managers. She sees herself not as a seafood buyer, but as a liaison to the seafood marketplace, scouting for new products, then presenting them to managers for testing and tasting.
She and her staff meet off-site at least one day every three months to review orders for the upcoming quarter, sample new products and decide by consensus which ones they will carry.
“What ends up happening is that you have managers and department leaders who believe in what they’re selling, and because they believe in it, that [is conveyed] to their team,” says Englade.
“When you believe in what you’re doing, you do a better job of it. They know they’re selling this product because they choose to sell this product, not because they have to.”
Englade brings a lengthy seafood background to her buying position. She grew up in Louisiana and began her career selling seafood in 1984 when she went to work for Safeway’s seafood department. It was a natural fit for Englade, who grew up by the water and sold fresh shrimp, crawfish and oysters and fried oysters, shrimp and catfish Po Boy sandwiches in her brother’s New Orleans seafood shop.
In a few months, Englade became the department manager at Safeway and stayed for the next year before moving to Olson’s Foods, an independent grocery chain in Seattle where she spent five years. She then worked at Thrifty Foods, another independent chain in Seattle, for the next four years.
By then, Englade knew she liked selling seafood and working for independents and knew that seafood had big profit potential when it was purchased, merchandised and sold correctly. So when a large corporation purchased Thrifty Foods, Englade left to join Town & Country, working first in its Ballard store, which at that time included a new seafood department as part of a just-completed remodeling.
In 1999, she joined the management team to help complete plans and open the Central Market store. In early 2002, she was named seafood specialist, responsible for seafood procurement for all six departments.
Englade loves every part of being a seafood buyer, from sourcing the fish to cutting it and talking with customers. Englade’s enthusiasm for her job clearly pays off at each of Town & Country’s four full-service seafood departments, which generate up to 8 percent of store sales. The two departments that are combined with meat departments contribute approximately 2 percent of store sales.
Town & Country has learned that when it comes to seafood, breaking a few rules pays off. Seafood departments can be the under-performing category of big chain grocery stores. But this small independent has found designing large seafood departments and running them as profit centers to be a successful approach.
“We really expect the seafood departments to stand on their own with proper buying, proper selling, proper rotation and education of the customer, and be profitable,” says Englade.
The seafood department at Town & Country’s Central Market store in Shoreline, which Englade helped design and then ran for two years after it opened in 2000, has tallied double-digit growth over the previous year since 2001. It is by far the chain’s largest seafood department.
The Central Market concept highlights perishables, with large seafood, meat and produce departments stocked with a broad assortment of fresh, high-quality products.
Englade calls Central Market’s seafood department a seafood manager’s “dream” because of its size.
“There is a place to display everything,” says Englade. “You can offer everything. You don’t have an area of the department you struggle with because the store drives in a diverse clientele that wants everything.”
The seafood department is in the front of the store, framed by large, warehouse-type doors and the produce section. It includes 14 bins of live shellfish — crabs, lobsters, prawns and 10 to 12 different kinds of oysters — and a 32-foot bulk frozen case with bins on both sides and 5-foot endcaps holding more than 70 frozen products.
When approaching the full-service case, customers see 24-feet of iced tables loaded with offerings like whole monkfish, tuna and salmon, sashimi-grade ahi, Dover sole, sea bass and escolar. A 16-foot self-service case rounds out the offerings. You name it, and the Central Market seafood department probably has it or will find it at the customer’s request.
Often, when the store conducts special seafood promotions, like a whole-halibut sale or demonstration of exotic species, seafood sales climb to 10 percent of store sales.
Don Makata, president of Town & Country during the late 1990s when the planning for Central Market was in the works, visualized an airy and fresh seafood market. “He believed we could make [seafood] a profitable venture,” says Englade. “People would buy seafood if we presented it in a way so that we were proud of it.”
The design has also been effective in other locations. Seafood sales doubled at the chain’s Ballard store soon after the chain re-designed the seafood department to have the same look and feel as the Central Market seafood department, despite occupying a smaller space.
“Surrounding the customer with fresh seafood is the way a department should be, no matter what the format,” says Englade.
Englade’s next challenge, she hopes, will be to help design the seafood department in the company’s next store. Town & Country has not yet decided the location or format, but perishables will clearly play a big role, says Englade.
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