COVETED CORPORATIONS

They may be corporate chains, but these companies know how to make us want them.

IN-N-OUT

FIRST RESTAURANT Baldwin Park, Calif., in 1948

COMPANY HOME Corporate offices in Irvine, Calif., (the state where 201 of its restaurants are located)

TOTAL RESTAURANTS 251 in four states (Arizona, California, Nevada and Utah)

CLOSEST RESTAURANT Chandler, Ariz., 1,051 miles

FUTURE NORTH TEXAS LOCATIONS Former Steak ‘n Shake on Central near Caruth Haven; Coit near junction of 75 and 635; Firewheel Town Center in Garland; West Seventh in Fort Worth; Stonebriar Centre Mall in Frisco; The Village at Allen; Hurst; Las Colinas

WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL? Its food is fast, but never frozen: The company touts the fact that every hamburger patty is made fresh at one of its distribution centers. The menu is minimal — three burger options, fries, sodas and shakes — but the restaurant’s loyal cult following evangelizes an entire subset of off-themenu items with names such as “the Flying Dutchman” and “animal-style fries”.

What about Oak Cliff?

H&M is coming to Dallas, but it will not open a store in Oak Cliff. And neither will any other national retailer.

When discussing potential spots for corporate expansions, not one commercial real estate expert brought up our neighborhood. And when asked about it, Dallas real estate investor and former city councilman Mitchell Rasansky had this to say:

“I’ve lived in Dallas almost 74 years, and I don’t do any buying in Oak Cliff. I don’t like the demographics. To me, if people don’t have the money, they’re not going to go shopping.”

FROM THE HORSE’S MOUTH “We are a private, family-owned company

We operate all of our restaurants ourselves, and we don’t franchise, so slow growth has always been part of our strategy. The Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex is vibrant, strong, growing and filled with opportunities.We will have everything we need there — from warehouse/commissary and patty production facilities to a large, metropolitan area that those facilities can serve.Long term, we will also be able to serve other markets from that central distribution center.We are now under construction on our first two restaurants — Allen and Frisco. If everything goes well, we hope to open both in the spring. We should also start construction soon on the Caruth Haven site and, hopefully, a few others.” —CARL

PRESIDENT

EXPERT OPINION

VAN FLEET, PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENTVICE

“They’ve been very tight-lipped about their expansion process. What I’ve heard is they plan to open Dallas-Fort Worth with five or six units, and open them all at the same time.” —DAVIDSHELTON

“They are a cult dynamo on the West Coast. Anybody that’s been out there, they just love the whole program. Food is good, fresh, quick and efficient.” —ROBERT

YOUNG

The cult of off-menu

In-N-Out’s website (in-n-out.com/ secretmenu) acknowledges the existence of its secret menu:

Double Meat “Two 100 percent pure beef patties, hand-leafed lettuce, tomato, spread, with or without onions, stacked high on a freshly baked bun.”

3 x 3 “Three 100 percent pure beef patties, hand-leafed lettuce, tomato, spread, three slices of American cheese, with or without onions, stacked high on a freshly baked bun.”

4 x 4 “Four 100 percent pure beef patties, hand-leafed lettuce, tomato, spread, Four slices of American cheese, with or without onions, stacked high on a freshly baked bun.”

Grilled Cheese “Two slices of melted American cheese, hand-leafed lettuce, tomato, spread, with or without onions on a freshly baked bun.”

Protein Style “Your favorite burger wrapped in hand-leafed lettuce, instead of a bun.”

Animal Style

Burger of your choice with hand-leafed lettuce tomato

Insulting? Perhaps, but for many Cliff dwellers, the your-neighborhood-doesn’tfit-into-our-box mentality is worn as a badge of honor. The rest of Dallas can keep its Olive Gardens and JC Penneys, thank you very much. We’ll take independent restaurants and mom-and-pop boutiques any day of the week.

The crown jewel of this type of retail in our neighborhood is, of course, the Bishop Arts District, the success of which is starting to trickle down West Davis and into other nearby intersections.

“With Hattie’s and Tillman’s and Eno’s, they all feed off of each other — those eclectic, fun, special, non-chain kinds of places,” Robert Young says. “People love it, but I don’t see Chico’s and White House Black Market and Sonoma or many of those people congregating there, probably because they’ve deemed that that’s not where their customers are and not a critical mass.

“Oak Cliff is a niche market, and a niche market does have the potential for unique restaurants and small shops. I don’t think that people who populate the malls or other shopping districts are worried about coming to Kessler Park or Bishop Arts or Oak Cliff.”

So no critical mass of national retailers, but Oak Cliff has reached “a critical mass of cool destination restaurants,” Mike Geisler says. “I think now that they’ve broken that barrier, they have all kinds of potential for additional dining.” pickle extra spread

Great, but what about more grocery stores, especially the boutique sort?

Geisler’s brokerage company, Venture Commercial, has been working on the Sylvan | Thirty Project along Sylvan between I-30 and Fort Worth Avenue, trying to identify a grocer for the site. At press time, the project’s developer, Brent Jackson, stated that a grocer has signed a letter of intent, but he hasn’t identified the grocer because the contract isn’t final.

“We’ve just had a hard time,” Geisler says of luring a grocer to the project. “It’s hard to see how deep a market it is. We’ve shown it to many specialty grocers — the Sprouts and Newflowers and Whole Foods of the world.”

Whole Foods in particular knows it has extremely loyal customers in Oak Cliff, Geisler says, in part because one of the Whole Foods Oak Lawn store managers lives in our neighborhood.

But “they cannot figure out if there are enough real Whole Foods types of customers to support a Whole Foods type of store,” Geisler says. “There’s a real need, and a sophisticated, educated, qualityconscious customer. All the grocers are saying, ‘I see those customers, but are there enough of them?’

“I think it’s a matter of time. Oak Cliff is continuing to turn over, and lot of people are buying homes and updating. It’s one of my favorite markets.”

A number of large retailers are starting to look seriously at Oak Cliff, whether neighbors want them or not. Geisler mentions Target as one such retailer and says that “a huge theater needs to service that population somehow.” The challenge for both is land availability.

“Oak Cliff is very built out, so trying to find a larger parcel for a Target is hard,” Geisler says, “and the land values are expensive enough that it’s almost prohibitive at times.”

This won’t be enough of a barrier for much longer, predicts Mark Miranda. He and partner Craig Schenkel own and manage various properties in our neighborhood, including Jimmy John’s and medical offices on the corner of Bishop and Colorado across from Methodist hospital, and Café Brazil,Anytime Fitness and others at the corner of Bishop and Davis.

“A real estate representative from fillin-the-blank company, I’m assuming that they have to make so many deals a year to justify their existence at the company,” Miranda says. “It’s a lot easier to go to Preston and Forest, Frisco, Rockwall. There are corners there with 10 acres,

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Homegrown Hits

These restaurants have Dallas roots, and now they’re sprouting all over the map.

SINELLI CONCEPTS: WHICH WICH AND BURGUESA BURGER

FIRST RESTAURANT

Which Wich: Downtown Dallas, December 2003

Burguesa Burger: Inwood and Harry Hines, May 2009 (closed)

TOTAL STORES WW: 115; BB: three and the demographics are appropriate. I think the demographics are appropriate in Oak Cliff; it’s just finding a space.”

IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD: Burguesa Burger on Fort Worth Avenue and Sylvan — it’s the only one in Dallas.

COMPANY PHILOSOPHY Dallas’ Jeff Sinelli founded Genghis Grill before selling the company in 2003, then launched Which Wich — more than 50 varieties of sandwiches with a unique ordering system (grab a paper bag; mark meat, topping and condiment selections; wait for sandwich to be made and delivered in same paper bag). The concept quickly spread across Dallas-Fort Worth, then Texas, and then the country. He still owns the original location; the rest are franchised. Whereas Which Wich is a “new, current, hip, young sandwich brand,” Sinelli says, his latest concept, Burguesa Burger, was developed with longtime Hispanic employee Pablo Gallegos and is a burger joint with both Mexican and American influences. The restaurant’s menu is in both English and Spanish, and restaurants accept both dollars and pesos.

Miranda believes the chains are seeing the success of independent stores in our neighborhood and are changing their thinking. He hears from real estate brokers that major companies have demanded the brokers to “get creative and find us a spot” in Oak Cliff.

“I think one person or one company takes that leap, and that others will follow that herd mentality,” Miranda says.

Jackson, a Kessler Park resident, says he hopes his mixed-use project will be the tipping point. Sylvan | Thirty’s design includes roughly 11,000 square feet for the grocer anchor, spaces for residential and office, and more than 30,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space.

“Our site sits at a very lucrative location,” Jackson says. “It serves truly as a bridge — from a macro standpoint between North and South Dallas, and on a micro standpoint, it serves as a bridge between Oak Cliff and West Dallas.”

Monte Anderson lives in our neighborhood and owns Options RealEstate, a firm focusing on properties in Oak Cliff and Southern Dallas. He also owns the Belmont Hotel caddy corner from Jackson’s development.

Anderson agrees with Jackson that “right now at this time in history, the only place a grocery store would go is Sylvan and I-30,” which would “take care of all of Kessler and all of the traffic going to Grand Prairie and Arlington.”

As for any other soft good stores — textiles, clothing and such “it’s coming, that’s all I can tell you.” Anderson is on a personal mission to convince Buffalo Exchange, a national consignment store with an independent feel, to move into our neighborhood.

A dense population of lunchtime eaters drove Sinelli’s decision to open the original Which Wich Downtown. “That’s where you start — you want to make sure you have a core of customers,” he says. “But as the brand developed, we found that we had customers in the suburbs the schools, the families, the soccer moms” who patronize the restaurant at dinner or after practice. More than 115 restaurants later, Sinelli says Which Wich is looking to fill in areas where the restaurant already exists and is fielding calls from throughout the country, plus Canada, Mexico and even Europe. Does that mean more Dallas locations? “Absolutely,” Sinelli says. “We would love to have more 214 [area code] locations, pretty much inside the 635 loop. We’re actually concentrating in the next couple of years to fill in those areas.” After the recession, he says, “new construction kind-of died, so some new projects are starting to get ignited again, and we want to be on the front end of them. We’ve found the model to do quite well in lifestyle centers, a combination of residential and restaurants.” Burguesa Burger, however, is Which Wich’s “polar opposite,” Sinelli says. “We’re still exploring with the model, and as we know more, it really belongs to the Hispanic community. You won’t see a Burguesa in Highland Park Village. It’s not that they don’t enjoy it, but there are just threads within the concept that belong in other areas.” He’s looking next toward San Antonio, El Paso and Brownsville, and unlike Which Wich — a restaurant that “needs to be in a place that’s brand new because we expect Which Wich to be there 20 years-plus” — Burguesa fits best in second-generation restaurant space. “There are more restaurants than needed right now, so why not recycle old ones instead of building new ones?” Sinelli asks. “And if you do it right, you can literally save hundreds of thousands of dollars — or pesos, as we say in Burguesa.”

EXPANSION PLANS

But according to Kerstin Block, owner of Buffalo Exchange, when her Lower Greenville store managers visited BishopArts, they reported back to her that “it’s just too slow over there.”

Bishop Arts has the vibe she’s looking for in a Buffalo Exchange locale — “artsy people, people who are into fashion, people who like to hang out at coffee shops, go to clubs” — but her other essential in a location is walking traffic. Bishop Arts is “just really dead,” Block says, “except for maybe Saturday nights, but we’re not really a nighttime business.”

Anderson’s other main target is AmericanApparel, known for keeping its clothing manufacturing inside the United States. He points out theAmericanApparel store in the Montrose area of Houston, “right in the middle of nothing — stuff that looks just like BishopArts. They’ve just got more density down there right now.”

Anderson is not a fan of density for density’s sake. As a board member and past president of the Congress for the New Urbanism North Texas Chapter, he is more interested in “quality density built into the fabric” — three or four stories of residential units integrated with retail, all of it “walkable”, or drawing customers that could walk, cycle or ride metro transit to the site. This is the kind of retail that would work with Oak Cliff’s terrain and appeal to its customer base, Anderson believes.

But traditional retailers don’t usually think in these terms, he says. “They want to see a big box, have all the cars in a parking lot, and get in, get their products and get out,” Anderson says.

This suburban style of retail won’t work in the urban environment of Oak Cliff, Anderson says.

For the most part, he says, “we haven’t learned yet to be urban in Dallas. If we had, they would come over to Oak Cliff and say, ‘Oh my god, look at the buying power.’ ”

Coveted Corporations

They may be corporate chains, but these companies know how to make us want them.

H-E-B

FIRST STORE Kerrville, Texas in 1905

COMPANY HOME San Antonio, Texas

TOTAL STORES 329 in Texas and Mexico

CLOSEST STORE Burleson, Texas, 49 miles

WHAT’S THEBIG DEAL? Customers love H-E-B’s highquality products, especially produce, for low prices no customer card needed. And unlike sister store Central Market, H-E-B carries staples like Cheerios, paper plates and 12-packs of soda pop. The company is in expansion mode, but doesn’t have plans to expand beyond Texas, according to an Austin American Statesman article quoting company president and COO Craig Boyan. In the same January 2010 article, Boyan said that the company’s move into Burleson was not indicative of expansion into Dallas: “It really is to serve Central Texas better. If you were going to go into Dallas, you’d put a warehouse in Dallas.”

FROM THEHORSE’S MOUTH “Our Central Market stores are the stores that serve the Dallas area. We have our distribution network that is largely