His Landry-group predecessors love to Monday-morning quarterback Fertitta's food. Tilman serves lowly sheepshead under its more glamorous modern label of "bay snapper," snipes Denis Wilson from a table at his Denis Seafood restaurant in far west Houston. "He's the Cajun Red Lobster!" snorts Nat Peck. Yet it is Fertitta's food, Fertitta's restaurants, that are packing them in. To him, Red Lobster is not an epithet -- he knows that his Landry's food and atmosphere beat the pants off the giant chain's -- but a role model of sorts. "Red Lobster has over 700 units out there and does over $2 billion in business every year," he says, lingering lovingly over the words, "two billion." "They've proven that there's a tremendous market for seafood. And there's nobody out there doin' it!"
Except Fertitta, of course. He sees himself in the tradition of Houston's strong restaurant operators -- the Tony Vallones and Mandolas and Pappases who have made it so hard for national chains to do well here. But he also sees himself as shooting to the top of the restaurant-world heap. "By the end of next year, we'll be the second largest seafood company in America," he proclaims with the entrepreneurial bullishness that springs so easily from his tongue.
Unlike the original Landry's seven, Fertitta has no intention of letting an attachment to place, or to a way of doing things, get in the way of growth. "I've taken the Cajun out of the restaurants," he announces, noting that he's introducing a de-ethnicized gumbo, and that Landry's erstwhile crawfish logo has been denatured into a shorter-snouted, generic "seafood character." "I'm more of a fresh Gulf seafood house, or a fresh seafood house," he explains, editing even as he speaks. "The biggest mistake a chain can make," he says, "is to go into a market and say, 'God, everything we do is great and they're gonna love it.' You have to tweak your menu, regionalize your menu. You're only as good as what the people like."
Declaring this manifesto moves him to reflect on the men he bought out. "They should have been this great restaurant family, but they never changed anything," says Fertitta. "They were so far ahead of themselves in the '70s and early '80s. They let the Pappases learn from them and build a big restaurant company. Then I bought them out and built a big restaurant company. It's ironic."
The ultimate bigness of Fertitta's empire will depend on how the company handles the pressure of very rapid growth. "Remember I've got all this money I've got to spend," says Fertitta, referring to the $40 million raised in his two stock offerings. So far Landry's is making its 1994 target of eight new restaurants. But the stock that was so hot last fall and spring has cooled off of late, dropping from a high of 27 to around 18, and The Wall Street Journal has published low-level market rumblings that Landry's stock is overvalued. Fertitta dismisses the naysaying. "When you've got a stock that does as well as ours, you're always going to have people who sell it short," he maintains. As to the conventional wisdom that insider stock sales (such as Fertitta's sale of $25 million worth of his own shares) can be a sign of trouble, Fertitta told the Journal, "If I didn't sell a few shares every now and then and put a few million dollars in my pocket, I'd be an idiot."
"No matter what happens with this company, I'm secure for the rest of my life," he says. Not that he's going anywhere, he adds hastily. "For the next five years I'm going to focus entirely on this company." After that? He'd like to own a major-league sports team, a goal that seems considerably more feasible now than it did last year, when Fertitta's attempt to purchase the Rockets ended in an unpleasant round of lawsuits. He still owns 3 percent of the Rockets; he sat courtside for the team's triumphal march through the NBA Finals, and reports that the bad feeling engendered when he tried to enjoin former Rockets owner Charlie Thomas from selling to Les Alexander has abated. "Charlie asked me a couple weeks ago when I was going to buy a car from him," chortles Fertitta.
It's no accident that Fertitta is preoccupied with keeping score. Corporate badges of success seem to interest him more than personal ones. "I live in a big house in Memorial, I have two Mercedes, I have my own jet, and so I mean, what else?" he asks rhetorically.
Scoring in Red Lobster's league, of course. Surveying his new Galveston restaurant, Fertitta offers up a comparison with his Louisiana predecessors. "None of 'em are doing... even Denis, Denis has that one restaurant that's maybe doing $40,000 a week. He serves good food, but he's not makin' a bunch of money. I mean he's just earning a living." Realizing how this sounds, Fertitta crawfishes. "One day I might like to do something like that, operate one restaurant, and do that for fun," he suggests. But he does not sound for one Texas second as if he means it.
