Bill Gilbert says the restaurant industry’s future is sort of like its past
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What’s the future of the restaurant industry in America?
Why not ask an important figure from the past: Bill Gilbert, the dapper-looking octogenarian and co-founder — with his father, Joe Gilbert, and Paul Robinson — of Kansas City-based Gilbert/Robinson restaurant empire.
Gilbert/Robinson was a major player in building the American casual-dining concept in the 1970s and ’80s. The company was sold off, in pieces, in the 1990s, but Bill Gilbert still continues to work as a consultant. Today, Gilbert spoke to the members of the 40-Years-Ago Column Club at the Plaza III Steakhouse, the iconic local steakhouse that Bill Gilbert and his partners opened in 1963. When asked what he saw as the future of the restaurant industry, Gilbert said that “change is always the case. Every day there are new ideas, new change, a new innovation.”
Discussing the current culinary trend, gourmet hamburgers, Gilbert says, “Once there’s a hot new concept introduced, everyone jumps on the bandwagon. A few years ago it was steakhouses, and there was a glut of overbuilt, overdone steakhouses.”
And Gilbert well understands how the current economy is affecting today’s restaurant business. Long before the Gilbert/Robinson partnership became a chain powerhouse, exporting the Houlihan’s Old Place and Bristol Seafood Grill concepts across the United States, Joe Gilbert ran a lunch counter at the junction of Ninth Street and Delaware — during the Depression.
