O.C. Man Teams Up With Friend to Buy Upscale Restaurants
A prominent Orange County businessman and a Southland restaurateur have bought a popular beachfront fish house in Los Angeles and an upscale barbecue restaurant in Beverly Hills from Restaurant Enterprises Group Inc.
Former Balboa Bay Club President Richard S. Stevens has teamed with Robert J. Morris to buy the original Gladstone’s 4 Fish and R.J.’s the Rib Joint, both originally founded by Morris, for $13.5 million.
Morris sold the two restaurants to W.R. Grace Co. in 1983 for $6.5 million, which were then acquired by Restaurant Enterprises in a leveraged buyout. Morris continued to manage the restaurants despite the ownership changes.
He built Gladstone’s into a dinner restaurant that fed 1.1 million guests a year with gross receipts of $13 million, which Morris said makes it the top sales volume in California and eighth in the nation.
The two Los Angeles area restaurants proved so popular that spinoffs of each were opened in Newport Beach. The Gladstone’s and R.J.’s in Orange County were not part of the sale and will continue to operate under Restaurant Enterprises management.
Morris, who grew up in Malibu, built the original Gladstone’s in 1972 along Pacific Coast Highway. Its fresh fish menu and picturesque location gave the restaurant a distinctly California appeal that attracted locals and visitors alike. The restaurant features barrels of free peanuts for waiting customers and chocolate chips are served with after-dinner coffee.
A Bel-Air resident who remains president of the Newport Club, Stevens described Gladstone’s as “the eighth wonder of the world” and said the deal is the first of several restaurant ventures he is planning with Morris through their company, IHV Corp.
Stevens said impetus for the sale came one day when his old friend Morris asked him, “Why don’t you help me buy my company back?” He said that Gladstone’s, on the beach at the foot of Sunset Boulevard near Pacific Palisades, is a high value restaurant that among other things, offers a large outdoor deck and is “a very healthy, safe place for a boy to meet girls.”
Stevens served for 22 years with Wrather Corp., rising to president of the hotels and real estate division with authority over the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim and the Queen Mary/Spruce Goose attraction in Long Beach. He founded the Big I Boosters and the Chancellor’s Club for UCI and is former president of the Newport Beach Area Chamber of Commerce.
Norman Habermann, president of Restaurant Enterprises Group, said the sale of the two restaurants will allow his company to concentrate on its primary line of business, chain restaurants. The company operates such well-known restaurant chains as El Torito, Charley Brown’s, Coco’s and Carrows.
“We’ll miss the cash flow, but we got a lot of money in our pocket” from the sale, he said.
