Restaurateur Figures Fast-Growing Irvine Is Spot for Upscale Prego

In San Francisco, folks commonly wait 90 minutes to eat dinner there. In Beverly Hills, they wait an hour.

But will anyone in Irvine wait for . . . Prego? By mid-March, Orange County residents will be introduced to Prego--which means both “please” and “thank you” in Italian--one of the West Coast’s more popular casual Northern Italian dining formats. Analysts and competitors generally agree that the move into Orange County by Spectrum Foods Inc., the San Francisco-based company that owns Prego, is well-timed. As some of the nation’s finest hotels and office buildings rise in Orange County, top-rate restaurateurs are just beginning to take note, and their eateries are trickling into town.

“Orange County is growing up,” said Laurence B. Mindel, president of Spectrum Foods and restaurant group president of Spectrum’s parent company, Saga Foods Corp., a $1.5-billion Menlo Park company that acquired Spectrum in December, 1984, for more than $16 million. “You can’t take a sophisticated, Northern Italian restaurant to Topeka. But there are enough upscale people here to understand the difference between mediocre food and great food,” he said.

Still, Mindel knows that by building the $1.6-million restaurant at Koll Center, Spectrum is taking a gamble. After all, of the eight restaurants Spectrum now owns in California, all are doing very well with the exception of its single Orange County entrant--MacArthur Park in Huntington Beach. With its lunch traffic far below expectations, Mindel says, the 3-year-old restaurant, which specializes in seafood and ribs, is struggling to break even.

Not Much Activity

Also, the Koll Center area is hardly a hotbed of evening activity, and Mindel is aware of that fact. “My buddy Don Callender (president of Marie Callender Pie Shops Inc.) warns me you could shoot off a cannon down there most evenings and no one would know the difference.” But competition is also waiting in the wings with a total of seven restaurants planned for the 95-acre complex, where Prego will soon stand as just the third.

Yet Mindel is convinced that the Irvine Prego--which is being built to look like an authentic Tuscan villa--will not only succeed, but will post first-year sales of more than $3 million and eventually rank as the chain’s most profitable restaurant. Some experts agree.

“The growth potential in Irvine is enormous,” said Barbara Dawson, West Coast editor of Restaurants & Institutions, a Chicago trade journal. According to Dawson, a majority of Irvine residents eat out at least three times weekly, and food and beverage sales in Irvine have more than doubled in the past five years to a projected $62.7 million in 1985 from $25.1 million in 1980.

What’s more, the city’s population of just under 80,000 is projected to exceed 214,000 by the year 2020, according to the Irvine Chamber of Commerce. Beyond that, nearly half of the households have annual incomes of $50,000 or more. “Aside from a few restaurants in some of the new hotels, Irvine only has a few fine restaurants. This is an area crying out for upscale food and beverage,” Dawson said.

Even the competition agrees. “There’s a ready-made audience here of young, intelligent people who will go for a restaurant like Prego,” said Hans Prager, owner of the Ritz, one of Newport Beach’s most popular restaurants.

At their restaurants in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Spectrum has clearly tried to appeal to that crowd by offering light, fresh fare in a casual atmosphere with dinner entrees priced between $12 and $15. But Mindel says it is the details that make the real difference. For example, pizza ovens at Prego are fueled only by oak wood, all food is purchased locally and prepared from scratch and a restaurant consultant is paid to assure the authenticity of its Northern Italian recipes--some of which date back 500 years.

Mindel, 47, didn’t enter the restaurant business until 1971, when he struck up a partnership with Jerry Magnin, grandson of clothing chain founder Joseph Magnin, and purchased Chianti, a popular Hollywood Italian restaurant. Before that, Mindel was president of Caswell Coffee Co., a San Francisco coffee-roasting company.

Within a year the two men formed Spectrum, and in the next 12 years they opened eight more restaurants, including Harry’s Bar & Grill in Century City in 1972 and the Beverly Hills Prego in 1983.

Since Spectrum was acquired by Saga Foods last year, however, there are clear signals that both the Prego and MacArthur Park formats could spread outside of California. Saga owns such large national chains as Straw Hat Pizza, Black Angus, Velvet Turtle and Spoon’s, which recently opened in Buena Park.