New flex-casual idea helping Mama Fu's drive sales

Many fast casual restaurants typically do well at lunch while dinner business falls off. Mama Fu's Asian House has developed a hybrid to boost sales at dinner and weekends. During the day, Mama Fu's locations operate with counter service for the lunch rush, but at night and weekends, the concept turns into a full-service format, making it more appealing for the dinner crowd, such as families. Randy Murphy, the president and CEO of the brand based in Austin, TX says, " the hybrid concept has proven very successful with Mama Fu's costumers, bringing in a dinner crowd that skirts most fast-casual concepts." He goes on to indicate, "Whereas most fast-casual concepts will do 60 percent revenue from lunch and 40 percent revenue from dinner, we do the opposite with 40 percent lunch and 60 percent dinner, and a lot of it is because of our flex-casual service model." This is one reason Mama Fu's has turned around from a struggling brand to a successful concept looking to grow. Will keep you posted if other fast casual concepts transition to flex-casual prototypes in the future.

Food Trucks entering Dallas

Much has been written about the success of food trucks or mobile restaurants in cities like LA, Portland, Austin and New York and the failure in Dallas. However, I see the trend will come about in Dallas in time. Austin saw the explosion of food trucks like Torchy Tacos that has since
grown into a full fledged restaurant chain opening up storefronts in Dallas. The codes for operating food trucks were poorly written or not well defined. This created problems until comprehensive codes were developed. Dallas codes are currently very restrictive preventing
food trucks from traveling the streets. Right now developers are meeting with Dallas City officials to mirror some of the new Austin codes so that Dallas can have a well coordinated approach to monitoring food trucks. There are plans to turn the old Arcadia Theater site on Lower Greenville in to a food park with space for chefs to park converted trailers and trucks with picnic tables and public restrooms. Also, Bishop Arts District the Dallas Arts District and West Village are other areas discussed as possible food parks. This will create new
energy to different areas of town and give Dallas more variety as chefs bring in new food ideas.