Food For Thought:

FM Staff

By Phil Romano with Steve McLinden
Dearborn Trade Publishing, Chicago 2005, $22 (hardcover)

Phil Romano needs no introduction for anyone in the foodservice business, so any personal retrospective is sure to have a built-in audience among his many fans and admirers. That appeal is counterbalanced by the inevitable egocentricity that is almost an unavoidabe part of any autobiographical enterprise such as this, in which a legendary figure talks about "how I did it."

Unfortunately, in this book you often get the worst of both worlds: a greatest hits run-through of Romano's career highlights served with plenty of self-congratulation, but precious little insight into his genius. Truthfully, there's little here you couldn't have gotten from an extended magazine profile written by a third party.

Take Romano's narrative of how he came up with his legendary Fuddruckers concept. He was eating in a McDonald's one day when it hit him that the world might want a more adult hamburger place, so he set about creating it. However, his banker turned him down, people said it wouldn't work (a recurring theme) and there was negativity all around. So what's our hero to do? Well, he doggedly put together his own financing and pursued his vision anyway. Voila! Another success!

What's missing is any real insight into why nobody else tried a similar concept, or if they did, why they failed while Fuddruckers succeeded. Even his revelation of how he chose the quirky name is disappointing—it seems he just wanted a word that sounded vaguely naughty, and this is what he came up with.

Romano does a better job with his discussion of Romano's Macaroni Grill, which was apparently meant to replicate the Italian home kitchen of his boyhood (and one-up Olive Garden, which he disses as "an Italian restaurant created by a corporation"). The genesis of such Macaroni Grill touches as the once-a-month freebees, the operatic Happy Birthdays and the jugs of cheap wine are explained and put into rational context.

Romano obviously could have a lot of interesting things to say about the restaurant business; he just doesn't say many in this book.