SELLING A LITTLE SIZZLE3

by D'Lyn Ford

This sidebar appeared in the Winter 1996 issue of New Mexico Resources,
as an adjunct to the article "New Mexico's Cookin'".
Photography: Tomilee Turner

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Cattle Baron restaurants' founder Jeff Wilson knows his customers to a T-bone.

Over the past 20 years, he's made it his business to know precisely what diners like in a steak and seafood restaurant -- from the beef-to-chicken ratio on the menus to the most inviting decor combinations of colors and rich wood.

"We provide a one-hour vacation for some people -- 'eat-or-tainment,'" Wilson explains. "The atmosphere, design, and layout are part of that package."

With the help of his wife Michele and his employees, Wilson has parlayed customer knowledge into an independently owned chain of restaurants in Portales, Hobbs, Roswell, Ruidoso, and Las Cruces, N.M., as well as Lubbock and El Paso, Texas.

Wilson's first restaurant experience was far from what he refers to as "selling a little sizzle" in the steak-loving Southwest. At 16, he started as a dishwasher for family-owned Chinese dinner houses in Seattle.

Subsequent restaurant jobs honed his management skills and whetted his appetite for his own restaurant. A stint at Cannon Air Force Base in Clovis introduced him to New Mexico.

In 1976, Wilson bought the foundering Bob's Steakhouse in Portales and began finding his way to customers' hearts through their stomachs. His success started, he says, with those first loyal customers, many of whom ate at Cattle Baron two to three times each week.

Though the original location was thriving, the expansion-minded Wilson postponed adding a second restaurant in Hobbs until 1983.

"We waited seven years to add our second location, because we were perfecting the first one," he says, noting the odds were against him from the start. An estimated 90 percent of all restaurants fail within two years.

With eight Cattle Baron locations under his belt, Wilson is still hungry to expand and innovate. His latest venture, a fun-loving Ruidoso restaurant and pub called Farley's, plays a role in his plans to grow, along with Cattle Baron.

"Our goal is to be a regional player in a five- to six-state area with both restaurant concepts," he says.

At corporate headquarters in Roswell, two clocks represent the evidence of that dream. One is set to local Mountain time, and the other to Central time in Lubbock, with plenty of space for more clocks on the wall.