Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 20, 1994 TAG: 9411220021
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: G-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LEIGH ANNE LARANCE SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
But for the last two years, they've been going their separate ways in the restaurant business, a fact not widely known despite recently publicized plans for ambitious expansion of the operations.
Roland "Spanky" Macher, 42, manages the four Spanky's restaurants, has started his own corporation and is branching from bologna to blue-plate specials with a planned '50s-style diner in downtown Roanoke.
Richard Macher, 40, who runs the eight-restaurant Macado's chain, is focused on Greensboro, N.C., where the chain will test its one-of-a-kind deli menu in its biggest downtown market yet.
Divided or not, the brothers appear to be beating the odds in a competitive industry.
One 1992 study found that roughly seven in 10 restaurants fail in their first decade, according to Lynn Deaner of the Virginia Hospitality and Travel Association. A solid financial plan and the ability to control costs are crucial, other studies found. Even then, restaurants are vulnerable in economic downturns.
"If we're in a recession, ... it is going to have a great impact on whether a restaurant stays in business," Deaner says.
The Macher family, now 20 years into the business, appears to have found the secret of success. Macado's and Spanky's target baby boomers and Generation Xers, who love eating out, according to those same restaurant studies. And the college market - a younger crowd looking for an inexpensive evening out - is somewhat recession-proof.
"It's fun," Deaner says of the restaurants' atmosphere. "It's entertaining."
The Machers' restaurants got their start in 1974, the same year Spanky - a nickname he got in high school, likening him to the scrappy character in the "Our Gang" comedies - graduated from what is now James Madison University.
The family had moved from New Jersey to Harrisonburg, where the brothers' father, the late Roland Macher, taught business courses at Blue Ridge Community College at Weyer's Cave. One thing the Machers missed in the Old Dominion was deli food.
"Dad bought a building in Harrisonburg, and said, 'What do you want to do with it?'" Spanky Macher said with a shrug.
So, what would become the family's restaurant chain was born there as the first Spanky's.
"The first two years we were open, my paycheck was $40 a week," Spanky said. That was OK, though, because he didn't have many expenses. He had just turned 22 and was living at home.
The first menu wasn't much, "a stupid little white, mimeographed menu" featuring basic deli fare, Spanky Macher says. He keeps a splotched copy - the only one left - in a frame on his office wall.
The first year, sales were $110,000, he says, but rose to $250,000 the next year. Richard joined the business in 1976, when the family opened its second Spanky's, in Lexington.
The chain continued to grow. Today, Spanky Macher estimates, Macado's and Spanky's together do $12 million in business. The Spanky's restaurants employ about 350 full- and part-time workers, and the Macado's chain has another 600 people on payroll.
In the original Spanky's, the high-end sandwich would have been the corned beef or pastrami at $1.59. But now, at both restaurants, the menus and prices have grown. Sandwiches are around $4 or $5 and deli basics have nicknames like the Alfalfa (roast beef and melted Swiss cheese), or the Spanky (turkey and ham with Muenster cheese, slaw and tomato).
In 1978, Roland Macher had a falling out with his father and left for Tidewater to start another restaurant chain, which he sold about a decade later before rejoining the family business. Macher declined to talk about the incident with his father.
"I basically learned what the world was about. I got beaten up pretty bad," he says now, describing Virginia Beach as a tough market. "I'm the one that's the risk-taker. ... I'm the rogue."
Rogue may be the word to describe the restaurants themselves. Whether in a Spanky's or a Macado's, there's no mistaking the decor.
The Machers are the kings of kitsch - the bigger and bolder the better. Customers in both restaurant chains eat amid trick mirrors and bigger-than-life models of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Superman, King Kong and other towering hominids. Walls and walls of family photos give the stores a homey touch.
There are planes, vintage Cadillacs, and memorabilia that tie it all together.
For both brothers, each new proposal seems to outdo the last. Roland Macher tried to surpass all the previous restaurants with the new Spanky's in Lynchburg, which he calls his flagship. His latest plan is for a downtown Roanoke restaurant he's sure will be a stop on any grand tour. The project represents an investment of more than $500,000 by Roland Macher and some partners he won't identify.
He pulls out an artists' conception of the diner, with a waitress on wheels above the entrance. He frowns at the drawing. Looks too much like a transvestite, he says, but he adds that the real thing will be better.
He plans to open the Star City Diner in a long-vacant former Hardee's restaurant at Jefferson Street and Campbell Avenue. The building sits in the shadow of the First Union Bank Building, a few blocks from his brother's Macado's.
"It's not a conflict with Macado's or Spanky's," Roland Macher says. "It's not in competition."
He describes it as its own thing, open until 2 a.m. most nights and 3 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, with a menu more diner than deli: Star City biscuits, eight kinds of three-egg omelettes, a coffee happy hour from 6 to 10 a.m. weekdays, pot pie, meatloaf, June Cleaver broiled pork chops and an Elvis is Back malt.
Roland's eyes grow wide describing the 16-foot Good Humor man and the dinocow - half dinosaur and half cow - that he plans to install. Instead of after-dinner mints, patrons will get Bazooka bubble gum. He's thinking saddle shoes for the staff, stars on the floor bearing the names of well-known Roanokers, and perhaps place mats with their baby photos.
"I want my name associated with the work I do," Roland Macher says of his reasons for opening the Star City Diner. "It might be ego." But that's not all. "It's opportunity. The market is exploding. Hotel Roanoke is opening the first of April.
"It's a whole new beginning."
John Grove, president of Downtown Roanoke Inc., says the diner will be another draw for the city. People who take in an evening show at Center in the Square might stick around for a late meal, coffee or dessert.
"It's going to fill a niche that's been needed downtown as far as an alternative late-night spot," Grove said.
Meanwhile, Richard Macher is banking on expansion using the same formula that has made Macado's a hit in college towns in Virginia, North Carolina and West Virginia. He's renovating a Greensboro, N.C., building that city officials there hope will revitalize downtown. They hope he'll succeed where others have failed.
That restaurant is scheduled to open in March.
What Macher "plans on doing is creating a destination type of restaurant that will have a substantial investment," says Robbie Perkins, a Greensboro city councilman and president of Maxwell Associates Inc., a real estate company that helped sell the property to Macado's. "Other restaurants were thinly capitalized, tried to do it on a small scale. They never attracted the crowds." With both the real estate purchase and renovations, the Greensboro restaurant represents a more than $1 million investment.
Perkins said he has been impressed by the Roanoke restaurateur.
"He's a very straightforward person and has a very engaging personality," he says. "He's very creative."
The creativity shows in his plans for the Greensboro Macado's. He pulls out a desk-sized model of the restaurant, a master plan for the 7,500-square-foot facility that will seat 293. (Blacksburg's Macado's, with 350 seats, will remain the chain's largest.)
"It's an old gas station, a car dealership," he says of the building he paid $425,000 to acquire. Richard, a fan of antiques, went to an auction in Atlanta to buy an antique biplane and smaller model planes that will be suspended from the restaurant's ceiling, with even smaller models in shadowboxes throughout the restaurant.
There will be a semicurved bar, Richard explains, outlining it with his hands and pointing to its place on the schematic. "There'll be an outside section" - the one in Salem has proved successful, he says - "with a new deck."
"But what makes this project so unique is its location. None of our restaurants are in any sizeable town."
Roanoke's population is about half that of Greensboro.
Richard hopes to add several restaurants a year to the Macado's chain. Even though the Greensboro project is still in the works, the chain has a contract pending on a 4,800-square-foot facility in Williamsburg.
He hopes to draw not only students from the College of William and Mary but tourists. "Williamsburg is changing," he says.
And then? Maybe Richmond's Shockoe Bottom, Richard Macher says, referring to a popular collection of downtown night spots in the. state capital. He's also thinking about opening more restaurants in North Carolina.
"I've got to have the management and personnel who want to participate. It's got to be fun," he says. "Part of the fun is being involved in the operation."
The Machers look strikingly alike: the same stocky build, the same mannerisms, although Richard Macher is more restrained. They have even more in common. Both met their wives at the Radford Macado's where both women - at different times - worked as bartenders while attending Radford University.
Both brothers have office space above the Roanoke Macado's, but their offices are separate and the brothers rarely run into each other, Roland Macher says.
He speaks his mind: He's unhappy about the split two years ago, but he dives into his new projects with his wife, Margaret, who is still in the restaurant business with her husband.
Richard Macher is reluctant to talk about the management change, but says it didn't work for the restaurants to have two bosses, and that both brothers needed room to be creative.
"This gave my brother the opportunity to do his thing and create a situation for himself," he says. "Sometimes it works better that way."
The restaurants, Richard Macher says, will go on pretty much as they have in the past. Patrons won't see any difference. Their mother, Shakie Macher, still holds an interest in both chains and is involved in the Spanky's in Harrisonburg.
"I think we're trying to coincide the basic ideas," Richard says. "Obviously we're two people and we do things differently. But we're trying to keep it together as close as we can."
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