Dinosaur’s Stage working on recipes for three more restaurants

SYRACUSE  —  The next 14-odd months could be less like slow smoking and more like pressure cooking for Dinosaur Bar-B-Que founder and CEO John Stage.

Stage has heaped his plate full of plans for new restaurants, with three Dinosaur outposts ordered for opening by the end of next fall. The company will start operating a Stamford, Conn. restaurant Nov. 14. Then it’s mapped out a location in Brooklyn that should be firing up in the spring. Finally, Dinosaur is set to launch a long-rumored Buffalo restaurant in the late summer or early autumn of 2013.

Those eateries will follow the opening of Dinosaur’s fifth restaurant in Newark, N.J. That location, which opened in May, is the company’s first outside of New York state. It’s now up and running on all cylinders, including catering.

Dinosaur’s other existing eateries are in Troy, Harlem, Rochester, and Syracuse, where it is headquartered in a building it owns at 246 W. Willow St. The Syracuse restaurant contains about 12,000 square feet.

The Stamford expansion is set for 845 Canal St., while the Brooklyn location will be at 604 Union St. In Buffalo, Dinosaur recently signed a lease with developer Mark Croce for space at 301 Franklin St. The three new spots are between 7,000 to 7,500 square feet — similar to Dinosaur’s other locations. Its only restaurants deviating from that size are Syracuse and Troy, the latter of which is around 9,400 square feet.

Each new restaurant requires about 110 new hires, according to Stage. Dinosaur employs about 700 people total, he says, including about 140 in Syracuse. It added 110 new workers when it opened in Newark in May, he adds.

Stage declined to disclose the costs involved in starting the new restaurants. Dinosaur, a company that has attracted investors over the years including George Soros, is funding the startups with its own cash, Stage says. He also declined to share many revenue details or projections, stating only that same-store sales grew by 1 percent to 2 percent across the board last year. But he took some time to sit down at Dinosaur’s Syracuse restaurant and answer a few questions.

Business Journal: Is it fair to say you’re opening restaurants more quickly than in the past?

Stage: Very much so. It’s obvious. Syracuse, we’re going on 25 years in Syracuse in 2013. And it was 10 years later, in ’98, I opened up Rochester. Then ’04 in Harlem, 2010 in Troy, 2012 in Newark.

Business Journal: Why are you expanding more quickly now?

Stage: A couple things dropped in. The Brooklyn thing dropped in my lap, and I just absolutely love it. Before I opened up Harlem, I actually had a lease in Brooklyn back in ’03 that just fell through. So, I always just looked at Brooklyn as unfinished business.

We looked at Buffalo for years, and it just never happened for whatever reason. We were looking down at the canal for a long time. Opportunities didn’t materialize for us. Other things came up, and you get distracted. But it’s something I always wanted to do. And then I finally found the right location. 

Stamford’s at the south end of Stamford, Harbor Point. Harbor Point was always very industrial, very gritty. It’s where all the old factories and everything were on the other side of I-95. They were all abandoned back in time. So in 2008, this developer calls me. And he had all these crazy — what I thought at the time were crazy plans, because the recession just happened, the world was melting down. And I said, “Good luck. I’m not ready. Stay in touch.”

That’s exactly what happened. We stayed in touch. And then I went out there about a year-and-a-half-ago and I was shocked. Everything he said he was going to do, he did. So the energy just drew me into it. Stamford–based Building and Land Technology is Harbor Point’s developer.

Business Journal: Do you have any concerns about growing so rapidly?

Stage: I spent a few years building the infrastructure to be able to pull something like this off. You never want anything to suffer from the expense of the expansion. We beefed up different players at different ends of the business to make sure it doesn’t happen. I never could have pulled this off five years ago or three years ago.

Business Journal: How do you keep quality from suffering?

Stage: We’ve had the staff of Stamford, the management team, working, cut up among all four or five restaurants over the last three, four months. So you’re opening with a seasoned team, which really helps.

What’s nice about having other restaurants is you can bring these managers in early on and get them trained so they’re not coming in cold to an opening. Because these openings are brutal.

Business Journal: Do you know how many more restaurants you want to open in the future?

Stage: You know, I don’t. I’m really focused on these three, and I have nothing else in the pipe right now. That could change.

Business Journal: Will any of the new restaurants look like the one we know in Syracuse?

Stage: I change it up every time. Basically I take the architecture and integrity of the building and then I let that dictate how the restaurant is going to feel. I never try to reproduce Syracuse in any way, shape, or form. This one happened so organically that right out of the gate I said I’d never try to do this again.

Rochester’s a 1905 train station. Harlem’s an old meat-packing house. Newark is crazy — a very, very urban-feel building right next to the Prudential Center.

The Stamford one is an old warehouse with these tremendous pillars. So I’m going with a concrete floor, great high ceilings, industrial windows. It’s going to have a little more of a lofty, warehouse-type feel to it.

Brooklyn’s an old tool-and-die shop, and I’m just starting to design that right now. It’s very funky. It’s concrete, it’s old beams. Right now I’m in the process of designing, and I love it. It’s fun for me.

Buffalo — Buffalo was big in the film industry back in the day, and the film was very flammable. So they built these buildings like brick houses for if these things caught fire. There’s all these little rooms. It’s just a very, very cool building, and I haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with it yet. But I know it feels good.        

Contact Seltzer at rseltzer@cnybj.com