Amick brings drama to dining

Amick is without question one of the most successful restaurant impressarios to ever come out of Atlanta. His company, Concentrics Restaurants, owns or operates 16 venues in Atlanta, Orlando and Chicago, and brings in annual revenues in the $50 million-$75 million range. It has 1,500 employees on its payroll. And, in the middle of the longest recession the nation has known, Concentrics is still opening restaurants.

The rap on Amick? Some in the food world feel at his high-energy restaurants, the cuisine take a backseat to the theater.

“They don’t like the fact that we [at Concentrics] use the word ‘concept.’ But the truth is our restaurants are busy and successful,” Amick says. “I just don’t build restaurants for the foodie elite.”

While Amick, 59, has been involved in the Atlanta dining scene for more than 30 years, even the most successful restaurateurs are reeling from the recession and changes in dining habits. The company as a whole, he says, has good months and bad. But Concentrics is not yet losing money, thanks to the consulting work and the continuing popularity of Two Urban Licks, which still serves more than 1,000 diners on weekend nights.

Yet Amick recently announced the closing of his most ambitious restaurant, Trois, which opened in 2006 at a cost of $7 million.

The current restaurant economy, he says, is “the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen in my life. (Sept. 11) was a hit, but you could feel the rebound happening soon afterward. What’s going on now is something that could impact people’s spending habits for generations.”

Amick does not look like anyone’s image of a restaurant baron — not in terms of his lanky form; nor in terms of his style sense, which favors baggy jeans paired with colorful and always untucked shirts.

Other restaurant owners make the round of tables in suit and tie, glad handing guests. If you catch Amick at one of his restaurants, he’ll most likely be fussing around the edges — arranging the bric-a-brac in the basement market at Parish or monitoring the workings of his 14-foot-high rotisserie at Two Urban Licks. He’s always tinkering with the décor and the ambiance.

“We [at Concentrics] get our knocks that we do too much theater,” says Amick. “That’s the frustrated architect in me, I guess.”

Amick — who grew up at the West Point military academy, where his father was director of the athletic department — got his start in the business in the 1970s with the Stouffer Hotel Company, which hired him to travel the country and open properties. In Atlanta, he met Steve Nygren, one of the founders of the Pleasant Peasant. This small Midtown bistro begat a new style of casual dining, with chalkboard menus and chatty service. Amick joined the company, just as it started expanding into satellite locations.

Nygren says that Amick’s innate operating skills were apparent from the beginning. “Bob has always understood that dining is not about satisfying people’s appetites. It’s about an experience.”

Within five years, he had become operating partner in the chain, which eventually grew to 42 locations nationally and went public under the umbrella of a larger company.

In the late 1998, Amick was eager to get back into hands-on operation. He left the Peasant group and opened Killer Creek Chop House in Alpharetta, a restaurant he sold three years later.

Amick then decided to reintroduce himself to intown diners. In a partnership with Todd Rushing (a young man he mentored much as Nygren had mentored him), he opened the dramatic and vibrant One Midtown Kitchen on a side street near Piedmont Park. Guests entered though its neon purple facade, waited behind a heavy curtain in an antechamber and then entered the sprawling, warm, amber-lit room. The restaurant has had an immediate and lasting impact on Atlanta dining by showing Atlantans would readily search out hidden restaurants as long as they’re rewarded with a theatrical entrance.

Two Urban Licks, opened in a 10,000-square-foot warehouse at the edge of the Old Fourth World. With its devil’s altar of a rotisserie and stacked steel wine casks, it brought a whole new level of drama to intown dining. Not to mention a vast infusion of cash and entrepreneurial capital to Amick.

Concentrics Restaurants began a massive expansion, opening Piebar in the iconic, cylindrical Trust Company Bank branch alongside Interstate 85; a gastropub, Tap, in the new 1180 Peachtree building in Midtown; and its big sister around the corner — the vast and ambitious French restaurant, Trois.

Concurrently, Amick began accepting consulting jobs, developing and staffing restaurants for hotels and other owners.

But Trois would be Amick’s first foray into the trickier world of “fine dining.”

“Trois was the ‘foodiest’ restaurant we attempted,” Amick admits. “It was also the worst-performing one we’ve ever had. We started feeling the recession there right when it started, in September of 2007.”

Though Amick thought Trois filled a void in the Midtown dining scene, he soon realized that his customers weren’t the sorts to look for upscale French food.

“We’re known as having casual, high-energy, off-the-beaten-path places,” he says.

Yet longtime food critic and Atlanta Magazine columnist Christiane Lauterbach — who also publishes the Knife & Fork newsletter — thinks the ambitions of Trois didn’t jibe with Amick’s skills, which she otherwise praises. “His style of service wasn’t polished enough for that price point and that style of dining.”

The bar at Trois will remain open through the summer while the upstairs dining room will be reconfigured into a more casual concept. Piebar, which never got much of a following for its modern pizzas, also closed. These days, Concentrics officially has 16 dining and drinking venues in its portfolio. The newest three, besides Max’s, are all in the Wit Hotel in Chicago, where Amick is currently spending most of his time. All three spots, he says, have been extremely busy since opening.

Yet sales are down at most of his core properties in Atlanta, with weekday dining and business entertaining particularly hard hit. “Like everyone else in town, we’re trying to come up with more programs and more deals to get people in early in the week,” Amick says. “No one — not one of us — knows how to do it. We’re just trying everything and seeing what sticks.”

Lauterbach believes that if anyone has what it takes to navigate the choppy waters of today’s restaurant economy, it’s Amick.

“The thing about Bob Amick is that he’s very ambitious,” Lauterbach comments. “He’s a concept guy in some ways, but he has this insatiable curiosity, and he likes to gather all sorts of ideas.’’

Lauterbach also believes that Amick learned the lessons from his time at the Peasant restaurants, which flourished in recessionary times by being accessible, fairly priced and entertaining.

“What Bob does is definitely the Peasant for the 21st Century,” Lauterbach remarks. “That’s not a bad thing to be.”