A Santa Barbara burger chain is Orange County’s newest restaurant company.
Habit Restaurant Inc. has moved its headquarters from Santa Barbara to Irvine after appointing a longtime Orange County restaurant executive as its chief.
“The intention was always to move the headquarters to Orange County,” said Russ Bendel, who joined Habit as chief executive in June.
Bendel has a long history in restaurants.
Before joining Habit, he was president of Calabasas-based Cheesecake Factory Inc. Earlier he served as chief executive of Tustin-based Mimi’s Cafe, which was bought for $182 million in 2004 by Ohio’s Bob Evans Farms Inc.
Bendel also worked with Outback Steakhouse and Roy’s, both part of Florida’s OSI Restaurant Partners LLC, and El
Torito, part of Cypress-based Real Mex Restaurants Inc.
“I’ve been a casual dining kind of guy for a long time,” Bendel said.
Habit owns and runs 27 restaurants in California, including four in Northern California. Most are in northern Los Angeles County, Ventura County and the Santa Barbara area.
The chain has been in business for more than 35 years with its first restaurant near the University of California, Santa Barbara.
The burger place is “pretty much a major food group at UCSB,” Bendel said.
The company plans to target OC and parts of Los Angeles for growth, he said.
Santa Ana Location
Its first OC restaurant is set to open in Santa Ana in December near Westfield MainPlace mall.
Habit serves hamburgers, albacore tuna and other sandwiches, salads and grilled chicken.
The chain fits somewhere between a fast food burger place and a casual restaurant with quick service and a broader menu.
What’s known as the quick causal segment “is really growing and has a lot of legs to it, especially with the lifestyle and affordability issues in today’s market,” Ben-del said.
Habit’s competition is vast, from burger chains such as Irvine-based In-N-Out Bur-gers Inc. to restaurants such as Carls-bad-based Islands Restaurants LP.
As Habit expands, Bendel said he sees the company bumping up against sandwich chains such as Panera Bread Co. and Il Fornaio (America) Corp.’s Corner Bakery.
Habit’s sales at restaurants open at least a year have been up for most of this year and last year, according to Bendel.
The company is seeing some diners bypass more expensive restaurants or move up from fast food burger chains, he said.
Greenwich, Conn.-based private equity firm KarpReilly LLC bought an 80% stake in Habit for an undisclosed amount in 2007.
The private equity group’s backers include BlackRock Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Paul Fleming, founder of P.F. Chang’s China Bistro Inc. and Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse, part of OSI Restaurant Partners.
Brothers Brent Reichard and Bruce Reichard, the chain’s founders, still own 20% and run four restaurants including the original in Goleta.
In 1976, Brent Reichard got his first job at age 16 at the first Habit and later brought his brother on.
They bought the restaurant in 1980 and in 1997 began to expand in and around Santa Barbara.
Habit has opened one to two restaurants a year on average. The chain is slated to open six this year, including the one in Santa Ana. Eight to 10 are planned statewide in 2010.
The company is set to open the restaurants on its own with no plans to franchise.
At one point, Habit hoped to open 100 to 120 restaurants in three to five years. Those plans have been scaled back.
“We’re comfortable saying we’ll have 100-plus locations over time, but its one restaurant at a time,” Bendel said. “The concepts that always seem to fail are the ones that are tying to run before they can walk.”
