Coming West Chester restaurant saw benefit of area businesses: Male clientele

The decision to bring restaurant and sports bar chain Twin Peaks to Butler County was a matter of not only location, but also gender demographics.

“West Chester, that particular location, we’re really geared toward predominantly male clientele,” said Ed Williams, managing member of franchisee JEB Food Group LLC. “So having Topgolf, the AMC, Main Event Entertainment … they draw our type of customers.”

There’s also the fact that the new location at at 9424 Civic Centre Blvd. inside the Streets of West Chester shopping center is near warehouses, plus hotels that that are geared toward guests dining out somewhere else instead of offering the dine-in options associated with full-service hotels.

“(All of that will) make it a strong location for us and our particular kind of restaurant,” Williams said.

JEB Food Group has signed agreements to develop seven Twin Peaks locations over the next six years in a market area that includes Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus and Florence, Ky.

Construction will start next month at the new location, the former site of casual dining restaurant Champps, Williams said. That location will be followed by locations in the Dayton and Columbus areas.

“We’re already negotiating locations for those areas,” he said.

Launched in suburban Dallas in 2005, Twin Peaks bills itself as “the ultimate sports lodge featuring made-from-scratch food and the coldest beer in the business, served by friendly and attractive Twin Peaks Girls.”

Locations also feature multiple fire pits on a patio. The West Chester location will expand its patio area to accommodate this feature.

The Butler County location will hire 140 full and part time employees starting in mid-August and open in early October, Williams said.

Twin Peaks operates 84 locations in 28 states, a company spokeswoman told this news outlet.

“Just recently it was acquired (by La Cima Restaurants LLC) to expand to it further … and there are plans right now to open up in the Pennsylvania market with several corporate stores,” Williams said. “There’s a pretty lofty goal of becoming a pretty major brand within the next five years.”

Williams said he has extensive experience in the restaurant business, including Wendy’s International when it started to full-service Mexican restaurants, hotels and nightclubs, but the Twin Peaks concept has four basic elements that he said work well together.

That includes not only waitresses clad in skimpy, red-plaid tops and menu items that are made from scratch, but also a patented beer-dispensing system that produces 29-degree beer from the tap and approximately 70 televisions that display a wide array of sports.

“It’s that perfect storm …. that people want when they go out, especially men going to a sports bar,” Williams said. “You want to be greeted by good-looking, professional servers, you want to be able to see every major sports (event) you can at any given time and you want to have great food while you’re doing it, and ice cold beer.

“You can’t ask for more and we don’t have really have anything like that in that Columbus-Cincinnati-Dayton market.”

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