Margaritas set to open Weymouth restaurant Tuesday
New England's largest independent Mexican restaurant chain shuns a cookie-cutter growth strategy. No two restaurants look alike.
One Margaritas Mexican Restaurant and Watering Hole is located in a former wheel loft above the Nashua, N.H., falls. Others are in historic downtown storefronts or shopping malls.
The newest, which opens Tuesday at Weymouth's Riverway Plaza, has a more typically suburban pedigree: a former Applebees restaurant that closed this spring after only five years in operation.
Margaritas is focusing on the Greater Boston area for its future growth, marketing manager Patrick Dowling said. It opened its first Bay State location on Waltham's thriving Moody Street restaurant row in 2003 and another in Revere in 2005.
Dowling acknowledges the chain still has low name recognition among Bay State diners.
"It's a little bit of a challenge in Massachusetts because we're new to a lot of people," he said. "They're not familiar with us. In New Hampshire, we're a known entity when we open a new restaurant."
Margaritas jumped at the opportunity to sign a long-term lease for the space in the busy Route 3A location this spring. Executives are undeterred by existing local competition, including Salsa's in Hingham, Acapulco's in Weymouth and El Sarape in Braintree. They hope to draw customers from Quincy to Cohasset.
Margaritas took possession of the 190-seat restaurant on May 1. Few vestiges of the casual dining chain's decor remain.
Hand-carved animal figurines and vases decorate the dining room and lounge, and brightly colored tiles are embedded in tabletops.
The decor is shipped to the U.S. following an annual week-long trip to Mexico by executives and key employees, who scour the shops of Tonola and Guadalajara looking for authentic Mexican artwork.
Menus feature mainstream Mexican entrees such as quesadillas, chimichangas and fajitas, the most popular entree. Most entrees cost $12 to $18.
And, as the name implies, a specialty drink menu includes 10 margarita varieties and other exotic libations.
The Portsmouth, N.H.-based company's partners, Shawn Joyce and brothers John and David Pelletier, got their start in the restaurant business working at the Chuck's Steak House chain.
As the steakhouse concept grew stale in the 1980s, John Pelletier and Joyce converted the Concord, N.H., Chuck's Steak House into a Tio Juan's Mexican Restaurant & Watering Hole. John Pelletier eventually bought the restaurant and began expanding the Mexican concept, bringing in another partner, Stan Bagley, and converting Bagley's Orono, Maine, steakhouse into the first Margaritas in 1984.
Although both Pelletier and Shawn Joyce eventually left the company for other opportunities, they returned to help oversee its expansion to eight restaurants by 1993, when they formed Margaritas Management Group Inc. The company, with Joyce as its CEO, now employs 1,100 people and operates eight restaurants in New Hampshire, five in Maine, two in Connecticut and two in Massachusetts.
"These are a bunch of guys and girls who started out with one restaurant 20 years ago and reinvested and reinvented the concept over the years," Dowling said.
Margaritas likes to build a high profile in communities where it operates. It sponsors field trips to restaurants for schoolchildren where they view videos of Mexican culture and history - and sample some of the fare. It hosts monthly "Full Moon Margarita Madness" promotions in which 5 percent of lounge receipts are donated to a local charity.
The Weymouth restaurant opens at 4 p.m. on Tuesday and will add a weekend lunch shift on Aug. 11. It will have about 60 full- and part-time employees.
"In Massachusetts, people didn't know who we were," Dowling said. "But we're starting to get our name out now."
Steve Adams of The Patriot Ledger (Quincy, Mass.) may be reached at sadams@ledger.com.