For some reason “Buca di Beppo” registered as a recognized phrase in my head but I had never heard of the restaurant chain until this article.

It is a little impressive that a story that explicitly makes comparisons to the Olive Garden frames “create a theme-concept chain restaurant with the walls covered in kitschy flair in 1993″ as the result of a particular vision and not just broad trends

Particularly, the rise of “edge city” exurbanism, with developers appreciating national restaurant chains able to plug proven concepts into their fresh-built highway-convenient shopping centers - I think the current “fast casual” chain boom is pretty similar in terms of how they appeal to urban developers

Outback Steakhouse was created in Tampa in 1988 by a company formed for the purpose of generating chain restaurant concepts. If you were going to theme steak after a foreign country it should really be Argentina, but for some reason Australia was a fad in ‘80s America.

TGI Friday’s, weirdly, was descended from a 1965 Manhattan bar that pioneered the concept of the “fern” or “singles bar” through the innovation of appealing to young single women, whose presence then appealed to young single men