Manzella Restaurant Group, now 20 years into doing business, is ready to turn the page on the next part of its story.
The company owns the upscale Taps Fish House & Brewery restaurants in its hometown of Brea, Irvine and Corona; Taps Brewery & Barrel Room in Tustin; and The Catch in Anaheim. It’s currently projected to do about $30 million in sales this year.
Over the next few months, Manzella Restaurant Group is set to further bolster its tech backend to improve the consumer-facing side of the business as it prepares to test two new Taps concepts—the quick-serve Taps Brewery + Kitchen and family-focused Taps Great American Brewery.
Randy Teffeteller joined as chief executive last year.
The end result is not only a streamlined and strengthened way of doing things across the Manzella Restaurant Group, but also becoming an aid to other restaurant groups that may be looking for help from the company’s burgeoning consulting arm.
“I’m not really interested in just loaning people some leveraged money and then they owe me money and we fix their brand. We don’t want to do that,” Teffeteller said. “We’re going to look for brands that we think are going to enhance our portfolio of restaurants and we’re going to do that through owning and streamlining technology.”
The company’s social media game is largely overseen by founder Joe Manzella, he even responds to individual comments on social media. Changes on social media, a text marketing campaign and improvements at the guest tableside level helped drive a 15% lift in sales last year, the company said.
A new point-of-sale system was recently implemented across the company that’s made the kitchen smart—AI smart, going as far as telling cooks down to the minute when to fire up the steaks.
“Now our servers can go back to what was super popular in the ’80s and ’90s: tableside service, making things at the table, really being an experience where people will go ‘That’s incredible,’” Teffeteller said.
The Taps app will eventually be enabled to capture more information about consumers—if they choose to opt in—including how many times they’ve eaten there, what restaurants they visited, what was ordered most recently and birthdays. If a customer is running late for a reservation, the app will notify the restaurant, so the reservation is held without requiring the guest to make a call.
“Information is king,” said Manzella, who founded Taps with his late father Fred Manzella and sister Michele Manzella.
New Concepts
Manzella Restaurant Group’s two new concepts are poised to open later this summer in Anaheim Hills and Yorba Linda. The quick-service concept Taps Brewery + Kitchen will be co-branded with Los Angeles artisan pizza and wing outpost Alondra’s, which is a possible acquisition target Taps is working on with Shamrock Foods out of Phoenix. That too, should receive a boost once the consumer app is fully built out. Guests will be able to snap a picture of a QR Code, launching a menu. Orders can then be placed, with the food delivered to the table. All of this tie back once again to the company’s new point-of-sale system.
“That’s phase three,” Teffeteller said of the app features. “We’re on phase one and phase three’s been perfected for the most part.”
