THE BRUNCH BUNCH
By Chris Wadsworth
There have always been restaurants that specialized in breakfast dishes. Think IHOP or The Original Pancake House back in the 1950s or 1960s.
But in recent years, we’ve seen a new breed of restaurant putting the focus on brunch-style menus – complete with fancy cocktails – and limiting their hours to morning and early afternoon.
In Northern Virginia, we have multiple First Watch restaurants, Baker’s Crust in Ashburn, a Toastique coming to Reston, and a new brand called Another Broken Egg headed to Brambleton. Brunch is becoming ubiquitous.
One of the first local examples of this trend is the Famous Toastery restaurant in Ashburn’s Loudoun Station center off Shellhorn Road.
Ashburn Magazine spoke with Famous Toastery owner Angela Goodman about this brunch-centric business model. Here are excerpts from our conversation.
Q: You opted to open a Famous Toastery back in 2016 – a restaurant that focused on breakfast, brunch, and lunch hours. What attracted you to this specific concept?
“I had been a customer of the original Famous Toastery back when it was called Toast Café when they opened in Charlotte, N.C. I heard that they were starting to franchise, and I’d been in Ashburn maybe eight months at that time and – quite honestly – I didn’t have a whole lot of breakfast options here that I liked. I wanted to get into the restaurant business, but did not want to have a traditional nighttime restaurant with all the challenges that that comes with.”
Q: So, you contacted Famous Toastery?
“I sent them an email and said, ‘Hey, would you be interested in Ashburn?’ and they wrote me back within a week and said, ‘Yeah, we would definitely be interested in that market. Let’s talk.’”
Q: Why do you think we are seeing more restaurants focusing on breakfast and brunch? From a business standpoint, what are the pros and cons?
“When IHOP first started, you think about how many pancake houses there were, right. So, the breakfast concept was a popular concept. It just had never been imagined as something that was more than pancakes. And so, when these smaller places like Famous Toastery started to develop more around the model of fresh food and not pre-made food – breakfast became more popular because the cost structure is better.”
Q: How so?
“Well, you aren’t required to have two full staffs. A lot of lunch and dinner restaurants have to have almost twice the amount of labor that a breakfast restaurant needs. You only have one staff of employees operating in those morning and afternoon hours so it’s better from a labor perspective.”
Q: The cocktail offerings were new – something the IHOPs didn’t have, at least back then.
“Breakfast is a meal that wasn’t being capitalized on. People were eating out for dinner. They were eating out for lunch. But then popular culture came around to, ‘Let’s have a cocktail at lunch. Let’s go out for mimosas.’ Mimosas became a big thing. Brunch was a fancy concept back in the day.”
Q: You’re paying rent for a full 24 hours, but you’re closed for much of the day? Is that a challenge?
“If you think about it, there are a ton of dinner restaurants out there that are only open from 4 p.m. to midnight, right? So, they’re open for eight hours. Outback is one of the big ones. It was only open for dinner. You couldn’t get in there for lunch, and they were still paying the same rent.”
Q: With the growth we’re seeing, the business model must work.
“What I’ve been able to do with our Famous Toastery location is get creative with revenue earning. We rent out the space in the evenings if someone wants to have a private event. We are also catering beyond the normal operating hours. So, you might not see our team in there serving customers in the dining room, but you’re seeing catering go out the back door at 4, 5 and 6 o’clock in the evening.”
Q: What does the future hold for these brunch-style restaurants? Trends come and trends go. Does this one have legs?
“I don’t think the breakfast concept is going anywhere. People love to eat breakfast out. It’s a cheaper price point [than dinner] – so if you want to eat out, it’s cheaper for you to go in the morning. I do think it’s going to be way oversaturated. In just our area, there are eight different [brunch restaurant brands].”