July 2006
UNIT DESIGN:
Damon's Goes To College
By Janice Cha

DAMON’S GRILL, FAIRFAX, VA.
Menu/Segment: Quick casual/ barbecue grill
Location: George Mason University
Designer: Alan Hamm Architects, Kensington, Md.
Size: 6,000 sq. ft./150 seats in full-service restaurant plus 32 seats in Express
Chainwide Units: 100
Expansion Plans: More campus restaurants in the works; look for 15 openings in 2007, 15-20 in ’08.
FF&E Package: $205,000 for a typical freestanding Damon’s
Founded: 1979 

If you’ve got a chain restaurant concept you’re planning to launch in a nontraditional setting, be ready for plenty of learning curves.

That’s what the design team for Damon’s Grill learned when they partnered with George Mason University and Sodexho USA to open an on-campus restaurant last fall, reportedly the first full-service chain restaurant to operate in a university setting. 

Mason is home to nearly 30,000 students, a mix of traditional and nontraditional students who mostly commute to campus and are okay with spending $10 or more for a meal. It’s also home to about 5,000 faculty and staff, and the famous dark-horse Division I basketball team that stunned the nation during the college playoffs this spring.

Mason officials had three goals: to turn an under-used student union into a destination, to keep students on campus for meals, and to ease pressure on the overcrowded student dining services in a nearby building. On Mason’s behalf, Sodexho looked at many casual-dining concepts. Requirements included full-service and fast-casual components, a drive-up window or curbside pick-up, and catering for faculty and staff events.

Damon’s Grill, a 100-unit chain of casual-dining sports-themed restaurants featuring barbecue, big-screen TVs and interactive table speakers, seemed the perfect fit. The deal was signed in early 2005, work started Aug. 28, and the restaurant opened for business three months later on Oct. 3.

The resulting operation is essentially two restaurants in one. The Damon’s kitchen not only serves the full-service dining room and bar, it also supports the quick-service Damon’s Express unit on one side and a walk-up to-go window on the other.

The Damon’s Express storefront helps anchor the food court, operating on longer hours than the restaurant, and accepts students’ prepaid meal plan cards. At the same time, planners had to accommodate storage and warewashing shared with several other small foodservice operations in the adjacent food court. Not your typical Damon’s anymore, in other words.

Sports, Plasma Screens And Barbecue

While quick-service chain restaurants have been fixtures at university food courts for years, the idea of opening a casual-dining chain concept on campus has been daunting due to the extra coordination and flexibility required to recreate the full effect.

“Sodexho charged us with [putting a] street brand in a nontraditional environment, so we attempted to incorporate everything we could at Mason,” says Ed Williams, executive v.p. of development for the Columbus, Ohio, chain.

A key difference in setting up a chain restaurant in the university world came from the extra sets of people involved.

“It became a real collaborative effort between the design team, Sodexho as the franchisee, the university, Damon’s and the contractor,” says Alan Hamm, project architect and principal of Alan Hamm Architects, Kensington, Md.

“Because of the tight three-month deadline, there was a lot of pressure to keep things moving,” Hamm adds. “It was an evolutionary process the whole way through—finalizing the equipment, making sure utilities were in, dealing with plumbing—it all [seemed to] happen at the same time.”

After more than half a year, things are looking good. One report says that Mason’s overall foodservice sales are up 12% this fiscal year.

Of Plumbing And Concrete

Renovating in older buildings offers its share of surprises. At George Mason, the “surprises” started with a lack of documents for the 40-year-old building showing the location of plumbing lines, causing the construction crew to have to dig around to find them.

Which then revealed the second “surprise”: the dining room, with the new bar in the middle, sat atop a 12-in.-thick concrete slab, triple the usual depth.

“This location, in the basement of the student union building, had seen three generations of restaurants, from cafeteria to snack bar and back again,” Hamm says. “There were layers of ductwork, piping and old finishes to work around or get rid of, as is the case with any major renovation.” 

That 12-in. slab was what they needed to dig through in order to run new drains and utility lines to reach the bar. “The trenching alone took nearly eight weeks,” Hamm notes.

Other challenges included awkwardly placed electric panels, inconvenient walk-in coolers and brick columns in the middle of the dining room.

Sports Haven With Menu

By opening day, the end result could just about double for a typical freestanding Damon’s. The upscale sports bar is outfitted with tile floors, wood trimmings and arched windows. Framed photos of Mason athletes, especially the men’s basketball team, adorn the walls.

The entrance, located in the main walkway of the student union building, lacks Damon’s eye-catching neon signage found at freestanding locations (university regs). That said, a well marked entranceway and window awnings visually set the space apart from nonbranded university spaces.

Inside, more signature Damon’s, in the form of two giant 10-ft. screens covering the wall of the Clubhouse dining area. More than a dozen 42-in. plasma TVs fill remaining walls and corners. (By contrast, a typical Damon’s would display four 10-ft. screens and about three plasma TVs, but the Mason site’s lower ceilings and columns dictated the change.) Adjustable tabletop speakers let guests choose which of the TV screens’ sports events they want to follow. And wireless Internet access is a must for a restaurant located at a university.

Seating choices got a few tweaks too. An area with high tables and stools takes the place of the standard booths so that students can group them as needed.

Another difference comes in dining area layout: the Damon’s proto calls for tiered, theater-style seating, in which the sections—the noisy Clubhouse (where guests can play interactive games), the Bar, and the dining room—are set apart using three distinct floor levels, each about 6” higher than the previous.

At the university, however, low ceilings interfered with that plan. Hamm instead created “virtual” tiers using different lighting and sound levels to separate the space into distinct areas: the bar with its high tables, an open area with dining height tables, and a more intimate area with banquettes.

The menu, too, was slightly edited for the university audience. Pricier items were dropped so that ribs, grilled tuna and pork chops could star. The full bar features drinks like Damon’s Mean Green Tea, wines by the glass, and draft and bottled beers.

Kitchen Cruisin’

In the kitchen, the cookline is modeled after a typical Damon’s store, albeit arranged somewhat unusually in order to position cooking equipment under the existing hoods and ductwork left over from the previous incarnation, a multi-use cafeteria.

“They had a chain broiler at one station, salads at another. We took all that out, but were left with the existing hoods and structural walls,” Williams says. “We needed a kitchen line that could also support the grab-and-go—more complicated because you have food moving in different directions.”

The solution: instead of having the line working from cook area to the server area, designers turned it 90 degrees to fit under the hoods.

“As a result, food moves parallel to where you want the service to be,” Williams says. “It requires a few extra steps to get food out to the dining room and the grab-and-go area, but it works.”

The main cooking and prep equipment line-up features a 750[deg]F-plus broiler for ribs and a 500°F broiler for burgers, chicken or fish; a bank of three fryers; and the make table, chef’s line and heated food wells. Convection ovens hum along practically round the clock, baking ribs, potatoes, beans and breads.

The kitchen was designed to handle extra duties. It supports the full-service restaurant, the Damon’s Express outlet and the walk-up window. It also shares its warewashing, ice machines and some storage with the nearby Jazzman’s Coffee, one of Sodexho’s café brands. And if that’s not enough, the kitchen shares freezer, cooler and some dry storage space with nearby Chick-fil-A.

Two Restaurants For The Price Of One

The Damon’s team had initially expected to adapt their airport location plans for Mason’s Damon’s Express—both being, theoretically, small spaces with high volumes.

But while an airport food outlet has to be essentially self-supporting where equipment is concerned, the Mason Express site could operate more like a grab-and-go shop, relying on the main kitchen directly behind its long wall for the bulk of the food production. As a result, equipment requirements went way down as planners eliminated duplications and sketched out the most efficient layout.

The pass-through window between Express and the main kitchen also slightly complicated the design, as planners had to take into account the view that Express customers would see as they stood at the counter.

“We were trying to keep the production kitchen at least partially screened and attractive so customers could see the activity beyond, but not look directly into a dish room,” Hamm says.

Outside of the shared kitchen wall, the Express unit runs as a separate entity, with much longer operating hours, its own POS system, entrance, signage and food court seating.

Even the menu got a makeover. Damon’s Express offers such fare as smaller portions of ribs, barbecue chicken sandwiches, burgers, chicken fingers, “items that are economically feasible for students, quick to prepare and easy to hold,” Williams says. 

“As we go forward in college campus stores, I expect that we’ll lean more towards [this type of] grab-and-go,” Williams adds. “The Mason experiment will no doubt lead to a university hybrid Damon’s.”

A Three-Season Store

The beauty of pairing Damon’s Express with the full-sized Damon’s lies in a fact of university life: weekends and summer.

“It’ll definitely be slower in the summer—that’s the way it is with universities,” Williams says. “Sodexho will keep the grab-and-go open when it makes sense, but the restaurant probably won’t be open all that much. The challenge will be in keeping the operations people and finding places for them to work during the summer, but that’s an advantage of working with a contract foodservice company like Sodexho.”

During the school year, nearly 90% of the waitstaff and kitchen help are Mason students, illustrating another advantage of university operations: built-in employees.

At this point, Damon’s has chosen not to market itself to the surrounding community, so as not to crowd out the students.

Still, it’s proving to be a win-win arrangement. Mason students and faculty get a cool new place to eat; the university enjoys more traffic to the student union building; Damon’s Grill builds brand loyalty with a captive audience; Damon’s learns about the institutional market; and Sodexho USA, which manages Mason’s campus dining services, gains satisfied clients.

And down the road—will Damon’s be opening at a university near you? Perhaps, but it pays to be patient.

“We’ve put in about five university bids with Sodexho, at least one of which has been accepted but not finalized, at Auburn University in Auburn, Ala.,” Williams says. “But universities tend to be long-term-planning-oriented. The one we’re closest to signing wouldn’t open until 2008.”