I think the reason Earls is opening all these new themes is because they've exhausted the "earls" concept. Maybe not the concept, but the name. They seem to have gotten too cocky for their own good. Their concepts and way of doing things are fundamentally sound, but they don't follow them as a whole as well as they used to. There are too many chiefs and egos floating around. Their USA expansion so far has been a virtual flop. They have tried stores in Texas and Arizona, and a long time ago in San Francisco. I can only speak from experience with the Texas location, but it was half-assed to say the least. The location, to start off with, was across the street from a hospital, and beside a light-rail transit station in a stretch mall type of setting with 50% of the surrounding businesses vacant or out of business. Needless to say it wasn't a typical location that you'd find an Earls up in Canada. The exterior of the building was horrendous. It was frequently said to us that it looked like a BBQ restaurant or a Denny's from the outside. There was a striped blue & off white awning along the front of the building & a 3 ft tall red/orange neon sign that read "EARLS RESTAURANT" in block letters exactly the way it looks as I just typed it. It wasn't in the typical "earls" font or signage. If you were to pick up the entire building and drop it in a similar location somewhere in say Edmonton, Calgary, or Vancouver - where the earls name is extremely well known - people driving by would probably not associate it with being an "earls" of the chain they are familiar with. They would in all likelihood assume it was a different type of restaurant with the same name and wonder how long it would take for a copyright lawsuit of the name to be brought against it. The inside - they blew around $750,000 on renovations (it wasn't built from the ground up like a lot of other Earls). Apparently this was how all the earls were going to be made into through updating of the older restaurants. It was very nice inside but the interior did not match the exterior. People that did stop and come in expected a "Denny's" when they pulled up, but saw a damn near Hy's Steakhouse on the inside. It wasn't quite that swanky, but close. Most of the business was done during the day in the restaurant and in the bar at night. Nighttime dinner business was non-existent. I went down there with a group of ten others from other Earls throughout Alberta and BC. We had to go out and staff a place that no one knew about. The work standards of a lot of the people were extremely lax and a sense of entitlement among the people recruited was also very high. In Texas, a lot of upscale/casual restaurants have a hostess seat you, a server take your drink & food order, a runner to run the food to the table, buspeople (usually a mexican) to fill your water/iced tea and a setter to clear the table. The server checks to see how everything is and then at the end drops off your check. Not a whole lot of interaction or work being done. We expected our servers to do all of these steps themselves and not treat the bussers as second class citizens. Consistency was also a huge problem. Manual updates went unknown for months at a time. Certain people with their egos inflicted their desires and ways of doing things on the staff and never followed up with the other staff to let them know that thye had changed something. Punctuality and attendance were brutal, but was let off with several dozen warnings before the person usually just quit. The GM was replaced barely a year into the business and replaced with the day manager who had zero experience in the position. GM turnover was huge. Four GM's in 5 years. No continuity could be achieved. Night kitchen sous-chefs were either drunk/hungover/or just plain incapable. Too much fod discounting was done in attempts to draw in customers. $5 Fridays was a popular one. The idea was to discount $5 off all steaks on Fridays in an attempt to get customers to order our steaks and see that they were the "best in Dallas". Anyone who has been to Dallas knows steakhouses are almost as prevalent as Starbuck's in Seattle. There are high end steakhouses with their own helicopter landing pads that make steak their business with professional 15 year broiler cooks making their steaks - not some 20-something punk who has only been cooking steaks for maybe 3 years. Even if we had a professional cooking just steaks, our meat was brutal as well. The best steakhouses in Dallas get their meat from Chicago, Iowa or Kansas City. Ours came from Canada by way of Scottsdale. They were shiped to us for a while by truck from Arizona, with no discernable ice/dry ice left in the shipping contianer they arrived in. One time the truck broke down and had to wait for a new truck to pick up their delivery and carry on with the trip. Somehow I doubt they had refrigeration that whole time.... Advertising was minimal at best. Not a good way to go about telling a new city about your restaurant. An example of a billboard was a huge picture of an earls fork with all but one of the tines bent back, so that it looked like a hand with one finger pointing towards something. The billboard read "This way to earls..." That was it. The fork wasn't even pointing in the right direction of the restaurant. There was a huge group of regulars that loved the place, but if it hadn't ben for all the office buidings nearby supplying lunch business, the place would have gone under after 1 year. It was like having a location in downtown, but no walk-in or drive-past customers. After 2pm except for Friday and Saturday, business was a trickle most nights. Brunch was tried 3 different times, failing each time for the same reasons everytime, but each GM thought they had the magic to make a brunch work. I heard the 2nd Phoenix location had a lot of the same problems. Currently there are only 2 Earls left in the USA. One in Scottsdale, AZ; and one in Denver, CO. Joey Tomatoes is going to be next to try USA expansion. They are going to be taking over six Cucina! Cucina! locations in the Seattle area and converting them to the new Joey's Mediterranean Grill concept. Guess they couldn't make Earls work, so they're going to try Joey's now. I hear that they are going to be opening an Earls in West Edmonton Mall in the Bourbon Street section this year, but that could get shelved the way things are going with the Earls concept. Hopefully OPM and Publik don't inherit the same faults that Earls has developed. Am I bitter? Yup.