By JOHN  SELF

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(Sept. 08, 2008) By the time you get to chapter seven in a book, it usually means that you are getting to the good part. You know the characters, you know the plot and the action is starting to heat up. Unfortunately for Bennigan’s and Steak and Ale, Chapter 7 did not mean it was getting to the good part. It meant it was going straight to the last chapter, the place where the hero dies.

For someone who began his restaurant career with Steak and Ale, the closing announcement was a sad, although not unexpected, finish for a once-proud restaurant organization. I had been casually keeping track of Steak and Ale for years and occasionally ate in one when our paths crossed. I always had the impression that it was a time warp—similar menu, similar decor and similar service as when I was there. I wondered how they could continue to attract new managers and retain old ones without growth.

I first came into the restaurant industry with Steak and Ale in the ‘70s. When I first started, I didn’t know a food cost from a walk-in cooler. Steak and Ale taught me controls, systems and costs. But it also taught me that the essence of the restaurant industry is people. After all, the best systems and controls are worthless without motivated people who care.

In hindsight, I now realize that Steak and Ale had, at all levels, assembled an extraordinary management team that expected the best from managers and employees and also gave back a sense of belonging and pride. We were ambitious and motivated to make our restaurants as profitable as possible to achieve personally as we expanded across the country. But we also were made to understand that we must develop others to truly succeed.

While I never knew Norman Brinker personally, I did come to realize that he was the driving force in instilling teamwork, integrity and excellence in Steak and Ale. Nostalgia being nostalgia, my memories of Steak and Ale tend to be good ones, but the reality is that Steak and Ale was not perfect by any means. As a rule, I worked six days a week and worked way too many hours each day. As a general manager, I was transferred five times in three years, which is never good while raising a young family. But all that is in hindsight.

The bad memories have faded, replaced by mostly good ones. The life cycle for a chain restaurant is finite, with beginning, middle and end stages. Along the way, there are decisions to either change or be complacent, which ensures that the chain inevitably will decline. For a chain to have the longest life possible, management constantly must re-evaluate, reassess and then respond as competition, customers and demographics change.

One can only speculate what the missed opportunities were and the wrong decisions made so long ago that caused Steak and Ale to decline and finally die. The toll of a single restaurant closing is costly and personal, with debts, loss of jobs and tragedy for the owner, with his dreams and money gone. For a chain, the loss is much worse, leaving thousands of employees out of work along with managers who have to go home and tell the wife that the company they trusted just folded. They probably believed right until the last phone call that a turnaround was about to happen.

Maybe, just maybe, the closing of Steak and Ale, so dynamic in its early days and now gone, will be a wake-up call for upper management who believe that they can still prosper without adapting.

The lesson is that they can’t.

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This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors and management at Nation’s Restaurant News.

John Self is a professor in restaurant management at Cal Poly Pomona and lives in Pasadena, Calif.