FS Food Group CEO Frank Scibelli was an MBA graduate whose only experience with cooking was growing up in an Italian family.

But somewhere along the way he recognized that good home-style cooking was exactly what the people of Charlotte, N.C. needed.

And he built his first restaurant there.

Some 34 years since opening the door to Mama Ricotta’s, Scibelli’s restaurant group has opened 17 restaurants serving crowd pleasing menus of Italian comfort fare, Asian fusion, and wood-fired southern barbecue.

“Keeping our customers is how we’ve lasted so long, making it through the stock market contraction in 2008 and covid,” says FS Food Group Marketing Director Remy Thurston. “We’ve always had the super-focused objective to serve the best food with the best ingredients, and offering this at a price that doesn’t exclude the majority of the population.”

In this week’s Boxerbrand blog Recipe for Success Thurston takes us through the up and down of the restaurant biz as experienced by FS Food Group.

Boxerbrand: How did FS Food Group get started?

Thurston: We began in 1992 with a single restaurant in Charlotte called Mama Ricotta’s. And it quickly became the place where you went, no matter what kind of day you had, to experience Italian comfort food. Our hallmark was and is to make sure the experience and food is consistent. In fact, it’s our guarantee. Because we know that nobody wants to spend $100 to dine at a place where you don’t know if you’re going to like the food.

Boxerbrand: How do you maintain consistency in product?

Thurston: Consistency really comes down to the team. As we’ve grown our restaurants, we’ve hired strategically to create an effective team of managers, who focus deeply on the customer experience. We have a recruiting manager to hire individual restaurant staff as well as managers for projects, marketing and facilities. We also have a CFO and a COO.

We now have 30 people working in our home office to oversee a 17-restaurant group that employs 1,000 individuals.

We’re able to hire great people because we pay very competitively, and our restaurants are so busy that a server working a busy Friday night will walk out with $500 in tips. And those servers know that that’s not going to happen unless they’re always driving forward on the customer experience.

The way a customer is treated, from the moment they walk into the moment they leave is a huge factor in their satisfaction. And we are always working on that.

Boxerbrand: How else do you instill the right work ethic in the people you hire?

Thurston: The biggest incentive is that all our restaurants are employee owned. Once an employee has been with the company for five years they’re invited to invest in new restaurants. This gives employees a huge stake in the game. This is where they get the passion to work night after night to make sure the experience, from the food to the service, is the best it can be. And our people stick with us. Our oldest employee has been with us for 32 years. And most of the people I work here have been here for 20. I’m still considered new even though I’ve been here for seven years.

Boxerbrand: What are you doing to food that makes it so appealing?

Thurston: We treat the food at all our concepts, whether it’s Italian, barbecue, Latin fusion, or anything else we do, as a true representation of the cuisine made with the freshest, best possible ingredients.

So, for example the food at our flagship restaurant Mama Ricotta’s is truly authentic. We started making our own mozzarella because when we opened, we couldn’t get it fresh enough. Our CEO Frank and another key employee flew to Wisconsin to take classes in making mozzarella. We make all our sauces in house, and we use ingredients we think are the best. For example, we use brown-cow parmesan, which is Parmigiano Reggiano made exclusively from the milk of the Bruna Alpina breed. It’s known for its rich, delicate and nutty flavor with toffee-like notes.

Frank is deeply involved in the development of our menus and ingredients, which he pulls from foods he experiences in his travels.

Boxerbrand: After the success of Mama Ricotta’s and another Italian concept, Little Mama’s, as well as Mexican concept Paco’s Tacos & Tequila, the brand sizzled in the smokehouse space. Tell me about that.

Thurston: We opened the first Midwood Smokehouse in 2011, and they’ve been so popular that we’ve been opening a new location every two years in the Carolinas. We have six freestanding restaurants and a seventh in the Charlotte Douglas International Airport.

Our claim to fame here is that we serve straight barbecue in a sit-down restaurant. We’ve traveled all over the south and brought the best methods and recipes to our smokehouses.

We serve a Texas brisket, which is influenced by the cattle industry, and therefore more beef based. The meat is taken from the chest of the steer, minimally seasoned, and smoked over hardwood hickory, on a live fire, for 12 to 20 hours. The result is the juiciest bite you’ll ever have in your life.

When we opened the first Midwood Smokehouse it was the first time customers could get brisket in our area, and that was a real draw for us. They also loved that we’re a full-service restaurant and not served out of a window in a setting out in the middle of nowhere. When we researched our methods in Texas we went to places where you had to get in line at 9 a.m. to get the barbecue at 11 a.m. We brought back the food, without the hours.

Boxerbrand: How did your infrastructure accommodate what was needed to recreate Texas barbecue in urban Carolinas?

Thurston: Doing this style of barbecue required a significant investment in custom-sized smokers. Every one of our restaurants is configured in a different shape, and we’ve built custom smokers to fit inside them. Each smoker is about the size of a storage unit and can fit 1,000 pounds of protein in them.

The size of our smokers allows us to bring in large quantities of brisket in from Texas and obtain bulk rates in the purchase price.

Smoking our meats is a labor-intensive endeavor which is overseen by an executive pit master with a specialty in smoking meats. And he has a person in charge of the pit at every restaurant, who carries out the precision work of trimming and smoking the brisket.

Brisket must be trimmed so that it’s aerodynamic in a way that allows the smoke to pass over it in a precise way that results in an even, perfect cook.

Boxerbrand: What are your other concepts?

Thurston: We have Paco’s Tacos & Tequila, which were developed from research Frank Scibelli did in Texas. This is a Latin infusion cooking where we make our own tortillas and strong margaritas. Another concept is our YAFO Kitchen, with is fast casual food where guests build their own bowls using ingredients sourced by an executive chef, with everything made in-house.  We do a big business with the lunch crowd working in businesses near our locations and with the after-work crowd picking up one our rotisserie chickens on the way home. And we have another concept called Calle Sol, which offers Peruvian and Cuban food. We did a lot of R&D in Tampa, Orlando and Miami for our ingredients and menu, which ranges from Cuban sandwiches to Chinese influences exemplified in dishes like our Cuban fried rice. On the Peruvian side of the menu there’s a lot of Japanese influences on our menu of raw fish seviche.

Boxerbrand: How have Boxerbrand menu covers worked with your restaurants?

Thurston: We have Boxerbrand menu covers in all our locations except our YAFO fast-casual. We felt Boxerbrand had an old-school focus on quality, and we feel they last longer than other brands, which is important in a restaurant that has a lot of customers and where there’s a lot of wear & tear on the product. We also liked Boxerbrand products for the ease in cleaning, the longevity and the variety.

At our Mama Ricotta’s we have a three-pocket folding menu and at our other locations a single-sheet 11 by 17.

Another selling point for us is the Boxerbrand customer service. I was born in Weymouth, Mass., so I bonded over that with your salespeople. Boxerbrand isn’t the cheapest, but the quality and customer service is better than the rest.

Boxerbrand: What makes you optimistic about the future of restaurants?

Thurston: Restaurants in general are agile, and good at pivoting. We exist to fill the need people must eat good food on their terms. If there are hungry people, there will be a place for good restaurants!

— FS Food Group, which includes Midwood Smokehouse, YAFO, Mama Ricotta’s, Paco’s Tacos & Tequilla, Little Mama’s and Calle Sol— uses Boxerbrand’s Capri, Ostrich Baby, Italian Ultra and Café lines in their table presentation. Thank you!