Could a return to its Clearwater roots save Hooters?

Seattle has the original Starbucks. Miami boasts the site of the first Burger King, now a for-auction car lot.

As for Tampa Bay? For more than 40 years, it’s laid claim to the original Hooters, a chain making headlines for a bankruptcy affecting 151 restaurants — almost two-thirds of domestic locations.

If a proposed bankruptcy settlement goes through, Tampa Bay and its Clearwater-based co-founder, Neil Kiefer, will be more intertwined with the brand than they’ve been in decades.

“It’s coming home, so to speak,” he said.

Kiefer’s company, Hooters Inc., runs 22 Hooters restaurants in Tampa Bay and Chicago, with plans for two new ones in The Villages and Wesley Chapel. The rest of the brand was franchised out in the early 2000s.

Together with another franchisor, Hoot Owl Restaurants LLC, Kiefer is offering to acquire more than 100 restaurants from Hooters of America, which filed for bankruptcy this week. That move will triple Kiefer’s employee count — though most franchise owners, store managers, servers and others will remain dispersed across the country.

Kiefer has a rosier track record than the bankrupt firm overseeing much of the brand’s current footprint. His restaurants — tucked in suburban enclaves like Brandon, North Tampa, Odessa and Port Richey, and beach towns like John’s Pass — earn roughly double the annual revenue of the imperiled restaurants he plans to take over, he said.

So why is Hooters faring better in Tampa Bay and Chicago than it is anywhere else in the country? And can Kiefer extend that success to the long-suffering locations he’s reclaiming?

National brands like Hooters typically fare the best near where they were founded, food service expert Darren Tristano said. Corporate owners can manage nearby restaurants more vigilantly, preserving food and waitstaff quality, and local communities may feel more nostalgia or loyalty.

Kiefer sold off the rights to his brand in 2001. Since then, he’s identified strategic missteps by Hooters of America.

As Kiefer tells it, trouble began when Robert H. Brooks, former owner of Hooters of America, died in 2006. Five years later, Brooks’ family sold off the brand, and for a decade, it shuffled among private investors. By 2016, Hooters of America operated more than 400 locations in 38 states and 24 countries.

Even at their best, Hooters of America restaurants underperformed those in Tampa Bay by about $1 million annually, Kiefer said. Private equity prioritized returns on investment, trimming expenses while dining areas and food quality suffered, he said.

Then came the pandemic, Tristano said, which shifted consumer preferences away from casual dining toward to-go orders and fast-casual concepts, just as Hooters was struggling to distinguish itself from popular “breastaurant” competitors like Twin Peaks.

“You just have a number of restaurants offering attractive servers, comfort foods and low-cost beer,” Tristano said. “The segment has gotten very saturated.”

In 2021, Hooters of America introduced a more revealing uniform, spurring eyerolls and complaints from employees. The move also earned disapproval from Kiefer.

“We’re a beach-themed thing,” Kiefer said. “It’s not a sex thing, like some people interpret that.”

At Kiefer’s Tampa Bay and Chicago area restaurants, a quarter to half of guests are women, he said. Hooters of America concepts attract a fraction of that, according to Kiefer.

“I think all those things were detrimental to the brand, and now it’s our job to try to stabilize it... and get it more operating like the original stores,” he said. “Which is a challenge, obviously, but one we look forward to.”

A bankruptcy court has four months to approve Kiefer’s proposal. If it moves forward, he’s prepared to launch a “re-Hooterization” campaign at underperforming properties. That means quality checks, renovations and training, he said.

But Kiefer can’t escape the reality that he’s reclaiming an empire in decline, Tristano said. While there may be an initial uptick in sales with better management, the food service expert expects that in 10 years, the majority of locations Kiefer plans to take under his wing will shutter.

The success of Kiefer’s effort will come down to brand strategy, Tristano said.

“Hooters is going to need to do something that their competitors aren’t,” he said.

That could be a local beer, or an emphasis on international operations.

From northern Indiana to Texas, Kiefer wants his restaurants to play up the brand’s original chicken wing sauce — which some Hooters of America locations stopped serving, he said — and invest in local charities, like Moffitt Cancer Center.

Change won’t happen overnight, Kiefer warned.

“Let us put in our systems, our culture,” he said. “Give us some time, and we’re pretty doggone confident about it or we wouldn’t be doing this.”