Despite the difficulties in making it, more new restaurants are popping up in Columbus

Starting a business is hard enough, but restaurants can particularly be under the gun out of the gate as they seek to draw finicky eaters with little to no marketing.

The failure rate hovers in the 80 to 90 percent range.

That said, Marcel Crawford believes he has an ace up his sleeve while preparing to open a country cooking eatery in the former Shoney’s site on Airport Thruway.

“You know why we’re not worried about that, because God is in control of this. His spirit is in here. Our faith is not that low,” Crawford said Friday as his staff prepared the 174-seat eatery for its June 5 opening. It will be called Ma’ Dear’s Country Cooking Buffet but also serve menu items with a Saturday Italian night planned.

“We’re trying to be a neighborhood friendly restaurant. But we’re doing it where you can come in and get more than a buffet,” said Crawford, also co-owner of Mrs. Cindy’s Southern Cooking Buffet that debuted on Macon Road in February.

With Ma’ Dear’s positioning itself to fill the void left by Shoney’s, the Columbus-area restaurant sector overall appears to be bubbling with life following the sharpest national economic downturn in decades.

For starters, the metro area will land its fourth IHOP later this year in front of the Walmart Supercenter on Gateway Road in north Columbus, said developer Ben Billings.

“We’re looking to close (the contract) in about 30 days,” he said Friday. “The people out here are tremendously excited. We don’t have restaurants. We have to go to Columbus Park Crossing to eat and everybody won’t have to go up there and fight the traffic just to catch a meal in the evening.”

That’s on top of the Chick-fil-A that just opened nearby off U.S. Highway 80. Billings also said Arby’s and Dunkin’ Donuts have been scouting the area for suitable locations, while a Japanese steakhouse has been hungering to open near his Billings Crossing center adjacent to the Walmart.

But Chick-fil-A is a coup, he pointed out.

“It’s very good for us. When Chick-fil-A does their demographics and they choose a store in an area, that spells good for everybody,” the developer said. “When they do their study and they say, whoa, this is ripe for the picking, it will get everyone else’s attention.”

Bustling downtown

Several new eateries also have opened in the downtown area of Columbus, including Broadway Cafe, Uptown Fish House on First Avenue and Uptown Wings, also on Broadway. In Phenix City, Giovanna’s, an Italian eatery, recently replaced Booth’s Corner Cafe & Grill.

Back on the north side of the city, near Starbucks and Columbus Park Crossing, work continues toward the opening later this year of a Bonefish Grill. The upscale seafood offering is owned by Tampa, Fla.-based OSI Restaurant Partners, the same company that operates the Outback Steakhouse and Carrabba’s Italian Grill chains.

Longhorn Steakhouse, meanwhile, is expected to land at Columbus Park, situated between TGI Friday’s and Arby’s on Whittlesey Boulevard. While no public timeline has been given for its opening, construction crews now are grading a large lot in the area.

And certainly more toward fast-food fare, but significant in that it fills a long vacancy left by the closing of Popeye’s Chicken & Biscuits, is the pending opening of yet another Popeye’s -- at the same corner of River Road and Manchester Expressway. Crews readying the eatery Friday said it looks to open in about three weeks.

An especially vulnerable business

Still, any growth in the “good eats” department comes with casualties. Closing their doors since the first of this year were Simply Southern at the old farmer’s market off Victory Drive, as well as Locos Grill & Pub off U.S. Highway 280 in Phenix City. The latter site previously was home to a barbecue restaurant and a Char-Broil Steakhouse, none of which have worked along the heavily trafficked corridor.

Failing to tend to basics can spell doom for any business, but food establishments in particular are vulnerable, said Lori Auten, area director of the University of Georgia Small Business Development Center in Columbus.

“The (Small Business Administration) will tell you that the three main reasons businesses fail is lack of planning, lack of management experience and lack of capital,” she said. “They don’t have enough money to survive. They underestimate what it’s going to take. And, usually, whatever you think it’s going to take, you need to double it.”

But there’s a Catch-22, and something with which Billings is very familiar. The restaurateurs seeking to open the Japanese steakhouse in his development have essentially hit a stone wall when it comes to financing the business, he said, and it has proven frustrating for both parties.

“I was told they got SBA approval, but the bank still turned them down because they just do not want to fund restaurants,” Billings said. “Nine out of 10 restaurants go out of business. But restaurants are what we need; restaurants are the interest we have in our facility. They simply cannot get any help from the banks.”

One final area that many restaurant owners fail to get a passing grade in is marketing, said Auten. Owners open their doors with great cooking, thinking the world will swarm to them consistently, and it just doesn’t happen. Mom and pop outlets are especially prone to this error because marketing can often be outside their “comfort zone,” she said.

But Auten points to a well-known chain, none other than Chick-fil-A, which during its grand opening last week gave out a year’s supply of food to 100 people who camped outside the doors of the restaurant operated by Ross Cathy, the grandson of the food outlet’s founder.

“People say, ‘Oh my gosh, how can they give away a year’s worth of free sandwiches?’ But that’s the cheapest advertising that Ross Cathy will do all year,” Auten said. “Look at the coverage that he got and how much fun people said they had camping. It’s really very, very smart.”

This story was originally published May 24, 2011 at 12:02 AM with the headline "Despite the difficulties in making it, more new restaurants are popping up in Columbus."