How Gene Street climbed to the top of the food chain

Notorious for his inability to sit still, at the precise moment that he was to become a rich man, Gene Street felt compelled to leave the room. In December 1986, Street, impresario of the Baptist food restaurant concept (praise the Lard!), and his partner Phil Cobb were closing the deal selling their Black Eyed Pea chain to the London-based Unigate company for $47 million. The ironic setting was the Mansion, where the words "chicken fried" cannot be located on the menu.

"While Phil was negotiating with the Brits, I was outside, walking in circles, having one of my famous anxiety attacks that I have all the time," Street remembers. "I can't control it. When I get excited, I begin to sweat. I can feel it dripping down off my ears, and I have to be careful about wearing a dark shirt whenever I am in a high-pressure meeting. I'll get sweat all the way down to my belly, and I have to wear shirts that disguise the sweat."

Given the direction of his activities a dozen years later, Gene Street may want to think about a terry cloth wardrobe. Aligned with three partners in Consolidated Restaurants Companies Inc., Street, 58, apparently seeks a destiny that would make him the Rupert Murdoch of casual dining.

Consider the one-year-old partnership's activities in 1998:

* Bought El Chico Restaurants for $60 million and incorporated Street's Good Eats chain into the partnership for an additional $15 million.

* Contracted to buy Spaghetti Warehouse for $61 million. (That transaction was scheduled to close in December.) Bought Cool River (where Street was a 50-50 partner with Steve Hartnett) for $12.5 million.

According to Street and his partners John Cracken, John Harkey, and Steve Hartnett, the acquisitions of 1998 serve as the appetizer. Like so many baby boomers flush with capital, the team plans on making the most of an acquisitions-crazy business environment. Listen to Cracken, plaintiff's lawyer turned restaurant entrepreneur: "We're buying companies that range from $25 million to $75 million. However, by the end of 1999 and into the year 2000, it is our hope that we'll be acquiring restaurant companies with a market cap north of $250 million and less than $750 million. There is a short list of companies in that category, and we'll be studying that list very closely in the next 24 months.

Mark the cap between $250 million and $750 million. That defines the universe of our targets."

The Street People intend to become yet another national food and drink powerhouse to be headquartered in Dallas, much like Brinker International (Chili's, Macaroni Grill, On the Border). How do they compare? "We're different in the context that they are expanding the store identification that they've already established, while it's our ambition to buy out existing entities," says Street. Thus the Street partnership would be viewed as attempting to scale the more treacherous mountainside, Street takes a more cheer view. "Brinker is a public company, and so they are responsible to their bankers and stockholders. We, for the time being, are only responsible to our bankers."

Street and his cohorts have devised a restaurant market invasion strategy that is geared to work on four tiers--an American grill (a la Good Eats) sector, a Mexican food sector, an Italian food sector, and what Street calls an Eatertainment sector. That would be the Cool River concept, a 22,000-square-foot steakhouse and bar in Las Colinas (currently the second-highest grossing restaurant in Texas) that nightly attracts a multitude of living testimonials to the miracle of cosmetic surgery.

If that $250-$750 million acquisition plan is indeed to outline the dimensions of Gene Street's serendipitous universe, then that universe has seen expansions and transformations that confound and defy most of the laws of astrophysics. Street is the product of Brownwood, a town where the twin West Texas cultural icons, Jesus Christ and high school football coaching legend Gordon Wood, were worshipped to the max. Street stayed just long enough to graduate from Howard Payne College, and after a stint in the Air Force, he "came to Dallas because it was the nearest available big city and approached the personnel office of every major company in the area." It was only after being subjected to some psychological and aptitude tests that Street learned that his brain configuration might have been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. All of the wiring seemed unorthodox.

"These potential employers would ask me. 'Are you sure you went to college? Are you sure you went to grade school?' Eventually, I saw a big printed finger pointing at an ad in the help wanted section--Do You Have What It Takes To Answer A Challenge?--and I went to work selling shock absorbers," Street says.

Shortly, Street would field the first of several lucky bounces that have come his way during his business career. He struck up a conversation with a stranger, a printing press salesman, at the bar in the old Knox Street Pub. That stranger turned out to be Phil Cobb. "Phil said he had $10,000 he could put his hands on and that he wanted to open a bar. I said that I didn't have $10,000, but I could scrape something up, so we became partners."