Bruce Drake and Brian McCarty are business partners and self-proclaimed polar opposites.
“We are oil and water, and that is as much a part of our success as anything,” McCarty said.
“We love each other. We’re like brothers,” Drake said.
Under their company, Bluegrass Hospitality Group, they have opened restaurants at a pace of about one per year since 1998. A handful of those BHG brands are in Lexington: Malone’s Prime Beef Steakhouse, Harry’s Bar and Grill, Sal’s Chophouse, Drakes and Old Bourbon County (OBC) Kitchen. Aqua sushi is on the menu at Malone’s and Drake’s. The BHG partners have also taken the Drake’s concept to Louisville and Florence, Kentucky, as well as Indiana, Tennessee and Alabama.
“All the horror stories you hear about the restaurant business are true,” McCarty said.
Roughly 97 percent of restaurants close within three years, Drake pointed out. The pair credits several factors for the success of BHG, including paying attention to people, product, real estate and purchasing; being fiscally responsible; treating team members exceptionally well; and providing value, quality and consistency.
“We balance the wants of the customer with the needs of our employees and our partners,” McCarty said.
Drake estimates that 50 people have been with the company 10 years or longer, three of whom started with him in 1989 when he was managing L&N Seafood. It’s not unusual to find management team members who started out at a BHG property busing tables or assisting servers, he said.
“We know they understand the brands, and we know their work ethic, and we know where their heart is,” McCarty said. He would rather promote from within “as opposed to going out on the street and hiring some whiz kid that’s supposedly done all these great things at a competitor.”
At any given time there are 800 to 900 employees in the Lexington stores alone, each of whom is trained through Bluegrass Hospitality Group University, or BHGU, for food and bar classes and company protocol. The owners have systems in place to keep themselves schooled on the pulse of their business, such as a secret shopper program. Undercover diners give the leadership team (seven people, counting Drake and McCarty) report cards at least 10 times per restaurant per month.
“There’s no way we could have grown without having a great group on our leadership team,” McCarty said. Soon after he and Drake partnered, they learned to divide and conquer.
“He is real good at operations, and I’m good at marketing and finance.”
They’re both skilled at knowing what diners appreciate. In fact, food and service are the reason McCarty and Drake are in business together in the first place. McCarty was a regular customer at Drake’s Regatta Seafood in Lexington Green, which prior to 1994 was L&N Seafood, a 42-unit seafood chain that was cofounded by chef Alan Lamoureux. Lamoureux is now BHG’s culinary director.
In 1997 McCarty sought Drake’s advice when he had the opportunity to buy his own restaurant, A.P. Suggins, on Romany Road.
“I looked at the Suggins opportunity as kind of a one-year MBA in restaurant management,” McCarty said. He had just earned an MBA at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
At Suggins, two of McCarty’s good lunch customers were the late C.B. McEachin and the
late J.W. Davis, developers of the Lansdowne neighborhood. They were looking for a restaurant to replace Columbia Steakhouse when it moved to Richmond Road. McCarty knew the area, as he had grown up across the street from the Lansdowne Shoppes. He asked Drake to partner with him.
“I wasn’t going to do Lansdowne without him,” McCarty said, “because literally, I’d only been in the business a year at this point.”
They brainstormed concepts. They traveled and ate at restaurants in Atlanta, Boston and Washington, D.C. A fellow restaurateur in Atlanta suggested they visit the prime beef steakhouses in Chicago.
Bingo.
In 1998 Malone’s in Lansdowne became Lexington’s first prime beef steakhouse. “Prime” is the USDA’s highest grade of beef quality, while “prime rib” is a descriptive term for a roasted rib-eye. Bluegrass Hospitality Group purchases its prime beef from Ruprecht Company in Chicago, which has been around since 1860. BHG sources produce from Kentucky farmers when possible.
With the cornerstones of Bluegrass Hospitality Group’s success being people, product, purchasing and real estate, the partners credit people first and last. The BHG team members are “the greatest on the planet,” according to McCarty.
“If we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t serve 25,000 meals a week,” he said. “Having the best team members in the world allows us to do what we love.”