Restaurants opened by hospitality groups make up a growing part of the industry

It’s almost dinnertime at Kidilum. The lights are low, the beats are bumping and the tables are set up to face a brightly lit open kitchen.

“It should almost look like a show, like a theatre,” said Sammeer Raajpal, co-founder of the restaurant group Hungry Trio, which owns this South Indian spot and eight other concepts.

The sort of performance happening here is what diners want to experience if they’re paying $45 for crab curry, said Raajpal. But putting on a show is expensive. Everything is more expensive these days.

“The rising cost of people, the rising cost of ingredients, the rising cost of real estate,” he said. “It’s just that when you’re a group it’s much easier to manage that cost.”

Diners might group restaurants into two categories: one-off local joints or big chains. But there’s a growing third option. Restaurants operated by hospitality groups, which house concepts of different names under one ownership.

“We do everything in house,” said Jeff Whiteman, COO of Geronimo Hospitality Group, which owns 40 concepts, mostly in the Midwest, including The Loading Dock and Blue Collar Coffee Co. “We have interior design in house, we have architecture in house, we have somebody that runs our purchasing for us.”

It’s about economies of scale. At one-off restaurants, one person does the job of many. At restaurant groups, someone’s sole job is, for example, to negotiate the best price for cooking oil.

“Let’s say you’re in a restaurant and the napkin that the silverware rolled in for somebody with a single restaurant is 11 or 12 cents a piece,” said Whiteman. “If I’m paying seven, it’s pennies, but pennies matter.”

Hospitality groups also tend to see less worker turnover. Geronimo employs 1,500 people, who receive benefits like health insurance. They can pick up shifts at different restaurants and grow into different roles.

Plus, the company is always thinking about its next move.

“In a single word what do we want this concept to look, to feel like?” said Whiteman, about Geronimo’s process for brainstorming a new concept. “And from that we try to establish if this is a celebrity, who is it?”

The method sounds a bit corporate. But the goal is to create something unique.

“The ideal is if a guest walks in and thinks that they’re going to meet the owner anytime walking around the corner, walking out of the kitchen,” said Whiteman. “I would think that by and large, people coming to our concepts have no idea that there’s a larger thing behind what they’re experiencing.”

Turns out there’s a chance your neighborhood watering hole isn’t a cool dive. It’s owned by a company that’s slinging PBRs and smash burgers at four other bars down the street. These hospitality groups are operating all over, from Omaha to Tucson to Sacramento.

“I think it is a little more common than people might understand,” said Lilly Jan, a lecturer of food and beverage management at Cornell University. “People want to take fewer risks when it comes into developing these concepts in these areas and so you’re not going to have as many mom and pop cafe shops.”

In a lot of ways though, restaurant groups are just giving diners what they want.

“And when consumers are very spend cautious, there is a consistency and a dependability and reliability about a well-established brand that can be very comforting because every dollar really counts,” Jan said.

That means every bite of food and interaction with a server counts, too.

“From the way the music was set, from the way the ambience was, from the way the lighting was, every single thing is going to come up together to create that experience,” said Raajpal, who’s opened a new concept each year. “And it's ultimately going to be that experience that's going to define in the customer's mind, whether the price that they paid was worthy or not.”