Nothing Fishy About the Fish Market’s Success
BY TANYA RODRIGUES
Staff Writer
Perhaps the real story of the Fish Market Restaurants, Inc. is best seen in the hallway leading to each of the restaurants’ “heads.”
For landlubbers who might not know, heads are restrooms.
Photographs of the company’s founders and owners, on fishing trips or with their catches of past days, fill the wood-paneled walls. The images are of laughter, passion for fishing, family and friends.
To hear the company’s CEO tell it, there isn’t much more than that at the restaurants’ roots. The
idea was inspired by a popular fresh fish restaurant in Newport Beach.
“Really, it was just started for fun,” said Alfonso De Anda, who has run the company since 1996. “The objective was, ‘Can we do a better job? Will it work?'”
Twenty-five years later, a single restaurant in Palo Alto has turned into a very serious business. Now, there’s seven seafood restaurants, a couple of upscale versions on the eateries’ second stories, a new express restaurant in Mission Valley, and a retail fish market at each location. There is a restaurant in Del Mar and another in Downtown, along San Diego Bay.
Although admittedly reeling from a turbulent year for the restaurant industry, the Fish Market Restaurants pull in more than $60 million annually, according to De Anda.
The San Diego Bay location, considered the Fish Market’s flagship, is said to be one of the top-grossing single restaurants in the state.
At the 850-person capacity site, with a Fish Market eatery and more upscale Top of the Fish Market on the second story, revenues exceeded $15 million last year, De Anda said.
However, business since Sept. 11 has been tough.
“It’s been chaos,” De Anda said. “It’s been crazy for everybody.”
Travel Woes
Not only was business from tourism affected, but also the Fish Market’s menus, temporarily.
When air travel was halted for three days after the terrorist attacks, so were the restaurants’ orders for fresh fish from other countries.
With a goal of having 20 fresh fish options on the menu each day, the restaurants in Southern California and the Bay Area found themselves buying more local fish, De Anda said. The Phoenix restaurant had to have fish brought in by truck, he recalled.
The company owns a fishing boat, a wholesale fishery and an oyster farm. It also operates a commissary in San Bruno, so the Fish Markets can buy a large supply of seafood and freeze it.
“If we buy Mexican white shrimp, which we consider the best shrimp in the world, we buy and store it for the whole year,” De Anda said. “It guarantees our product for the whole year and the prices, because we don’t want the price jumping up and down.”
Even before Sept. 11, De Anda said, the company found itself navigating a slumping economy, which affected its various markets in different ways.
At the beginning of 2001, the restaurants in the Bay Area felt the hit as the local dot-coms started to fall.
The location in Phoenix, the only Fish Market restaurant not in California, felt the pinch from the national economy’s slowdown. It was also affected by changes in the high-tech industry.
“When Silicon Valley deteriorates, so does Phoenix,” De Anda said. “They kind of go hand in hand. I don’t know why, but they always have.”
Until Sept. 11, the San Diego restaurants didn’t suffer in the same way. In fact, De Anda said, business remained steady and was even strong.
De Anda expects the restaurants to stabilize by the summer. It will also take that time for the restaurants’ pay scale to adjust to the minimum wage increase set for January, he said.
The company continues to move ahead. De Anda and some of the partners were negotiating a site for a new Fish Market restaurant in Irvine.
Solid Reputation
According to Stephen Zolezzi, executive vice president of the Food & Beverage Association of San Diego County, the various Fish Market restaurants have a very good reputation.
“They’re one of those guys … they’ve been here for a long time, they do a good job, they do big volume sales,” Zolezzi said.
The Fish Market Restaurants were founded in 1976 by a group of partners that included two developers of shopping malls.
One of them, Fred Duckett, kept a boat in Newport Beach. A good friend of his had pointed out a restaurant called the Crab Cooker, and Duckett was soon impressed by its quality of fish and the clientele.
With a group of three other partners, he considered entering the restaurant business with a similar fresh fish concept.
When the idea was presented to Duckett’s banker, another friend, he recommended they not do it. But the group won him over, and the first restaurant was built in Palo Alto.
The Fish Markets was the first and only company De Anda has worked for. He began 22 years ago, needing to support his new wife. His father helped the college student get a job with the Palo Alto restaurant.
De Anda’s first position there was an “errand boy” position assisting the managers. Within three months, he had begun cooking and had become a kitchen manager.
By the time six months passed, he was a manager and came to Del Mar to help launch the new restaurant. After that, he continued to climb the company ranks, from assistant general manager to general manager to partner, in 1985, and to CEO five years ago.
Slow, Steady Growth
The Fish Market headquarters, where the accounting work is done, is in the building next to the San Diego Bay restaurant. Operations are handled out of the Bay Area.
De Anda holds weekly meetings to troubleshoot with departments or managers for operations, accounting, human resources and marketing. He also keeps himself available to handle problems as they come up.
“I spend most of my day signing checks and answering my phone,” De Anda said.
He also monitors the company’s new ventures, which includes a new express Little Fish Market restaurant in Mission Valley.
“This is something we were trying to do to attract our same customer base but to eat more often,” De Anda said.
According to Zolezzi of the Food & Beverage Association, many operators are trying the express option, which has lower operating costs, more self-service and lower prices.
Of the Little Fish Market, he said, “I think they’re doing a great job they’re doing as good a job as they do ordinarily in their regular restaurants.”
According to De Anda, the express shop’s location , the Fenton Marketplace known for having the local IKEA store , is particularly close to Qualcomm Stadium. The proximity has proven problematic on stadium-event days.
“It actually hurts business instead of benefiting because people stay away from the traffic,” De Anda said.
The same thing happens with the Del Mar Fish Market restaurant, which sees its slowest business during the Del Mar Fair, he said.
For the Mission Valley location, the company is trying to develop promotions to encourage fans to visit before or after games.
All indicators say the express shop will be a good business, De Anda said.
Excited by the response, the Fish Market partners were expecting to open two or three “Little Fishes” a year , until Sept. 11 hit.
They still plan to build more of them, De Anda said.
“We’re not going to rush out there and open a hundred of them, but it’s another venue that we want to have,” he said.
The express venture has been good for the company’s own development, De Anda said, “That’s the only aspect of the market in California that we haven’t covered and you’re always looking for growth, although we’ve always been conservative.”
De Anda pointed to the company opening only eight restaurants in 25 years.
“We really don’t do growth for the sake of growing,” he said, “but in order to maintain our management staff and our employees, the company needs to grow.”
Express Builds On Success
The smaller shops are becoming more viable as real estate costs and availability make new ventures difficult, De Anda said.
“It’s more challenging to find the free-standing building with 200 parking spaces,” he said. “They’re just not readily available on every corner as they used to be many years ago.”
As a result, he said, exploring the express market makes sense.
“You have to have various markets that you can grow into, for whatever opportunities are presented to you.”
Doug Orr, a food service consultant for U.S. Food Service, which supplies various non-seafood ingredients and equipment, has worked with the Fish Market restaurants for more than 20 years.
According to Orr, Fish Market co-founder Fred Duckett has a philosophy that seems to have ushered in the restaurants’ success.
“He doesn’t skimp on quality,” Orr said. “They seem to always buy the best quality of whatever it is, whether it’s an ingredient or fish or a piece of wood that they’re going to use in the restaurant. He buys the best quality there is and charges whatever he has to charge to make a profit.”
Orr has seen the same thing with the way the company handles employees. Managers in training work in dishwashing, food prep and other departments, he said.
“They cross-train everybody very, very well,” he said. “It can be an expensive model, because training costs money, and cleanliness costs money, but customers appreciate it.”
Although times are tough, he’s seen the company overcome adversity before.
“When they built the Fish Market Downtown, everybody thought they were biting off more than they could chew because it was a huge restaurant and the Port Authority takes a big chunk of rent,” Orr said.
“Everybody’s like, ‘Gosh, how can anybody survive building a restaurant that big?’ But they were very confident and they did it, they’ve done well there.”
