Seattle Crab Co. casts net in upscale waters

Nation's Restaurant News, Dec 23, 1996 by Alan Liddle

SEATTLE - Positioned to fill a niche between quick-ser-vice fish-and-chips outlets and full-service seafood dinner houses the new Seattle Crab Co. restaurant here is doing a much greater volume of business than is the Skipper's fast-food unit it replaced, managers reported.

Open since early November, the counter-service restaurant with "upscale" dishes is named for its parent company Seattle Crab Co. The Bellevue, Wash.-based entity was created in April by investors in the Northwest, who purchased the remaining 110 units of the Skipper's quick-service seafood chain from NPC International Inc.

Pittsburg, Kan.-based NPC, which also operates hundreds of franchised Pizza Hut restaurants and owns the Tony Roma's dinner-house chain, bought the then-216-unit Skipper's in 1989. Under NPC's ownership, however, Skipper's couldn't find the formula to counteract declining same-store sales or problems linked to expansion outside the chain's core Northwestern markets.

Seattle Crab Co. was the creation of a committee of well-known Seattle-area culinarians and consultants working with the findings of consumer focus groups. The owners view the concept as a candidate for cloning and as a conversion vehicle for some underperforming Skipper's locations.

"It's doing three times the volume of a typical Skipper's," said Karla Horwitz, Seattle Crab Co.'s vice president of finance and chief financial officer.

Reports issued by NPC indicate that Skipper's restaurants generated average annual per-unit sales of about $425,000 for the fiscal year ended in March. That suggests that the 100-seat Seattle Crab Co. is trending toward first year sales of about $1.2 million.

"We're offering the water-front-quality seafood Seattle is known for at about half the [usual] price," Horwitz said, citing one of the reasons she believes the concept is popular. The company is able to price its products for less, she added, because guests "aren't paying for a view."

Seattle Crab Co. president and chief operating officer Paul R. Baird has declared the new concept "the answer for the person looking for great seafood without the formality" of a full-service restaurant.

Company officials declined to release details related to the new restaurant's performance and its development costs. They did say the prototype's average check is about twice that of the Skipper's chain but declined to provide, the per-person average for Skipper's. In contrast to the fried-fish-centered menu at Skipper's, the Seattle Crab Co.'s menu focuses on steamed, grilled and baked seafood items, most notably Dungeness crab and salmon.

At dinner whole and half Dungeness crabs, $14.70 and $9.90, are served chilled or steamed with drawn butter, lemon mayonnaise or chili dipping sauce and come with coleslaw, sourdough bread and a choice of house salad or chowder. Dinner "plates" - served with rice, coleslaw, sourdough bread and a choice of house salad or chowder - are crab cakes with grain mustard sauce and red-pepper mayonnaise, $8.60; grilled salmon with lemon-herb sauce. $9.90; baked halibut with Parmesan sauce, $10.90; and grilled shrimp scampi, $11.40. Also on the dinner menu are such "bowls" as 1.5 pounds of steamed clams in lemon-garlic-herb broth. $10.90; cioppino with crab, prawns, clams and cod, $12.90; grilled-chicken Caesar salad with sourdough bread and choice of fish or clam chowder, $7.50; and a four-piece basket of fish-and-chips with bread and coleslaw, $6.70.

The lunch menu features whole and half crabs, $12.70 and $8.90, with coleslaw and sourdough; sandwiches priced from $3.90 to $4.90, salads served with bread, $3.40 to $5.90;. and fish-, shellfish- and chicken-and-chips baskets, $3.80 to $6.20 Available during both dayparts are a kids menu of cod-, prawns- or chicken-and-chips, $2.95; soft drinks and a local brand of premium coffee. $1; assorted local microbrewery and national-brand beers on tap, $2 to $2.90; and white. red and blush wines by the glass. half liter and full liter, $2.90 to $16.90. As patrons do in a Skipper's restaurant, Seattle Crab Co. customers order and pay at the counter and carry their salads, chowders and beverages with them to a table.

While waiting for delivery of their entrees, Seattle Crab Co. patrons are attended to by "guest-service officers," who refill beverages. among other duties.

"There are plenty of places you can go to for wonderful seafood, but you are going to pay a price. This [concept] is accessible to everybody every day," observed consultant Kathy Casey of Seattle's Kazzy & Associates.

Casey, a consulting chef who has worked with Consolidated Restaurants and Restaurants Unlimited among other large foodservice companies in the Seattle area, served as an adviser to the Seattle Crab Co. development team. It consisted of Arnold Shain of Restaurant Concept Development, whose credits include work on the Cucina! Cucina! Italian cafe concept, menu developer Ted Furst, former vice president of food and beverage for Cucina! Cucina! and an 18 year veteran of the Puget Sound foodservice scene; advertising-and-promotions expert Leland Miyawaki; and architect William Harris, who has recently worked on Zoopa, Country Harvest Buffet, Grazie and Fresh Choice restaurants. Running the Seattle Crab Co. are general manager Charles Lumm, former vice president of operations and general manager of Arnie's Restaurants Northwest Inc. of Edmonds, Wash., a three-unit chain of seafood dinner houses, and manager Wendy Kerb, former manager of Arnie's Northshore outlet.