Many people may know Jon Taffer as his larger-than-life television persona, where he secretly spies on a bar’s operations before barging in with his “Bar Rescue” camera crew to yell at the owner about why their business is failing. He’s not afraid to get in peoples’ faces and tell them exactly where they’re going wrong, and has no qualms about exposing the employees who steal from the register right under operators’ noses. The ultimate goal is to help the establishment turn things around using some tough love. In a way, he screams because he cares—even if it’s the compilations of his “angriest moments” that earn him millions of views on YouTube.
But having a real-life conversation with him, one can’t help but notice how friendly and incredibly approachable the man actually is. “I’m Jon, by the way—Taffer is that guy up on TV,” he says.
He’s a staunch preacher of the value of full-service, sit-down restaurants, and a self-proclaimed “old bar and nightclub guy; I buy big into interactivity,” he says. “I believe people want to sit down and break bread together. I believe people love having coffee together and cocktails together and sharing a piece of cake together at the end of a nice meal.”
“So I bet on connectivity, and I bet on human interaction every time,” Taffer says.
Born and raised in a family of New York entrepreneurs, Taffer set out to make his own mark and relocated to Los Angeles, where he got his start in the bar business working at the infamous Troubadour nightclub in West Hollywood around 1978—which might be where his obsession with the turnaround game started. Staff theft was rife, and he was given full control of the bar within a year.
Taffer’s bar-forward focus on human connection also means he views the quick-service restaurant space “as one noisy world,” he says. “Half of those franchises that I’ve never heard of before are [quick-service restaurant] franchises, serving every kind of food you can possibly imagine.” Yet at the same time, he recognizes how the full-service, casual- dining environment has drastically changed in the past decade. Though it’s not as overcrowded as other segments, “there’s a lot of tired brands out there, and a lot of buildings that have tired brands out there that need conversions,” says Taffer…and he wasn’t afraid to mention names (but I am).
But Taffer is someone who likes to go in and fix problems. “We wanted to create a model that was easily converted from another footprint.”
Enter: Taffer’s Tavern, his solution to the outdated, soon-to-expire restaurant model of the past. The emerging franchise, which has two locations in Alpharetta, Georgia, and Washington, D.C. (plus a quick-serve unit in Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium), is created to be the quintessential pub atmosphere that brings friends and strangers together over old-world food and signature cocktails.
When Taffer began conceptualizing the concept in 2018, he knew he wanted to find a different approach to labor. “I didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘let’s do a restaurant.’ Let’s go back in time six, seven years ago,” he says. “Unemployment was very low. As an industry we were struggling to find people. Today, unemployment is very low, we’re struggling to find people … for the past 25 years as an industry, we have had labor issues. It’s not a new thing.”
“I realized the typical casual model doesn’t work anymore—the days of five or six people in the kitchen in a casual restaurant,” he continues, citing recruitment, training, and retention challenges. “And I’m realizing that wow, from beginning to end, there is an opportunity to redesign a kitchen; to start over again. And could we do that? Could we use food technologies like sous vide and great new cooking technologies from companies like Middleby and TurboChef and all of these new innovative and even robotic companies? Could we reinvent the kitchen?”
Reinventing the kitchen
You can’t find answers to things you don’t ask questions about. Taffer kept pushing and questioning—Could a restaurant have half as many staff, with 20 percent less time spent on training? He and his team went on a quest, searching for potential solutions at test kitchens around the country, where he tried different product types and learned about the latest updates in kitchen technology, until finally deciding on sous vide.
The low-temperature, long-time cooking method was invented by a French chef in 1974, and has been gaining popularity in recent years as operators seek solutions to lessen the labor load. Basically, food is vacuum sealed in a container (usually a plastic bag) and immersed in temperature-controlled water, where it’s evenly cooked from edge to center without overcooking. When a customer places an order, an employee can quickly and simply finish the dish.
The method provides unparalleled consistency quality across the menu, with no need for fryers or cumbersome exhaust hoods. Instead, convection ovens are used to reheat and finish menu items that were cooked sous vide by chefs at Cuisine Solutions, which uses computerized monitoring systems and precise temperatures and cooking times to ensure high quality.
“We said, ‘wow, okay, we might have changed the industry here,’” Taffer says. The next step? Designing a concept that fits around the technique and menu. “We started with food development, we started with financial engineering and labor and training models, and then we moved up to the concept to support the economic model,” he says. “I think that makes us really unique in the way we developed it. We really engineered it from the bottom up, rather than from the top down, and bottom meaning the bottom line.”
A bar is a bar, but a tavern has soul
Taffer and his team decided on a tavern concept because they wanted to provide an upscale dining experience in an approachable yet elegant environment with a great value proposition. Being approachable was a key element. They didn’t want to alienate guests who may be turned off by fancier and pricier white tablecloth establishments, but they also needed to provide a high enough level of service and quality of food in a fun atmosphere that makes people want to become regulars.
“We really wanted somebody to be able to go out, spend $48, and get a $70 or $80 experience,” he says. “And we said ‘OK, what kind of brand envelope delivers that level of experience? We have the kitchen to deliver that quality level.’ And we backed into tavern.”
“When you look at the history of taverns, local taverns always had great food,” Taffer continues. “They always had staple foods and comfort foods. They weren’t trendy, but they were the kinds of things you could count on … I know senior executives who go to taverns for lunch because they love certain elements of the food.”
Let’s talk about the food at Taffer’s Tavern for a minute. You’ve got classic staples like juicy chicken wings, tavern pretzels elevated by spicy queso and Guinness mustard, and of course, America’s favorite—a tavern burger loaded with crispy bacon, crunchy onion rings, cheddar cheese, and Taffer’s signature honey bourbon BBQ sauce. A plethora of comfort foods get a new twist, like Taffer’s Chicken & Waffles with crispy chicken breast and a pearl sugar waffle tower, complete with a housemade orange bourbon syrup and paired with golden corn fritters.
Then there’s some more adventurous yet still hearty options like the TT Poutine: tater tots topped with shredded braised short rib, decadent mushroom béchamel sauce, and creamy cheese curds; and the Cheeseburger Mac, which deconstructs the sandwich and transforms it into a mac and cheese with savory ground beef, topped with crispy bacon, diced tomato, and chopped pickle.
Local taverns have also historically been great at connecting communities. “People from all different economic and diversified lifestyles could all go to that tavern. It was approachable by all,” Taffer says. And, taverns naturally have a bar and drinking environment, which remains at the forefront of Taffer’s Tavern with a variety of crafted cocktails. The Campfire, for example, features Taffer’s trademarked Browned Butter Rye Whiskey mixed with bitters and simple syrup, and the Bubble² has a blend of botanical gin with fresh citrus and subtle honey, served with an accompaniment of sparkling wine that adds even more layers and flavors to the beverage.
“I’m Taffer. I’m the bar guy. I look at my peers on television who are all my friends—Gordon Ramsay, Robert Irvine, Guy Fieri—they’re all basically food guys. I’m really the only one, but they put me in a culinary space,” he says. “I’m the only guy in the culinary space who people say, ‘I want to taste his cocktails as much as his food.’ So I have a unique place as a brand, with this connectivity to cocktails and beverage programs, and I love it.”
And, luckily, Taffer’s Tavern has a nice ring to it—though that wasn’t the motivation or sole intention, he notes. “We like to say that a bar is a bar, but a tavern has soul. And that’s what we tried to create when we put Taffer’s Tavern together, when we really worked on the front-of-house.”
Taffer was very intentional about every design element that went into his concept. He wanted curated music and video programming that wasn’t just sports guys sitting behind desks. He also wanted to create an environment that was welcoming and friendly to all genders. He took all of his knowledge and past experiences over 40 years of being a consultant in the bar and nightlife industry to form something with potential to not only execute at a high level, but also to grow and scale to markets across the country.
As of press time, Taffer was just wrapping up shooting his 250th “Bar Rescue” episode. “The greatest lesson I’ve ever had from ‘Bar Rescue’ is that it doesn’t have to take that long,” Taffer says. “I would challenge every restaurant company in America to take whatever process they have, whether it’s an LTO process, a promotional or marketing or hiring process—accelerate it by just 10 percent, and watch what happens. Because I believe as an industry, we waste an awful lot of time on menu research, menu development, menu testing. The months that we spend over-evaluating, over-testing, I believe is lost revenue.”
Franchising dynamics
For someone with such a big personality like Taffer, one might wonder why he decided to give up a level of control with his baby, AKA Taffer’s Tavern, by franchising it. But he doesn’t look at it that way. “I think that we have designed kitchen systems and such where we really have great control over the product; it’s dropped on the plate. Honestly, it’s really hard to screw it up,” he explains. “And then we have a great support team, of course, to make certain that the teams are trained in each of the kitchens for each of the franchisees.”
And because of the concept’s lighter training burden, it allows franchise owners to hire people more for personality over specific cooking or serving experience. “I think where we sometimes blow it as an industry is because of the knowledge needed to work in our kitchen, it greatly limits the types of people that we can hire,” Taffer says. “Sometimes I can’t find that dynamic leader who has the kind of line experience that I need, so the experience takes the first place over the dynamic.”
“But dynamic leaders can change the entire outcome of a restaurant, the entire personality and flow. To me, being able to hire energy and dynamic and connectivity and all of these things is what makes restaurants great,” he adds. “That brings a restaurant to life. So that’s really exciting about the approach that we can take because of those lighter burdens.”
Taffer applies that strategy when vetting out potential franchisees, as well. “Those are the things that give me warm and fuzzies, if you will … being able to employ the dynamic personalities into the business and not have the deep burdens, so the operator can actually be in the front of the house shaking hands. What a novel idea.”
According to Taffer’s Tavern’s franchise disclosure document, the franchise unit in Georgia generated $3.5 million in gross sales from June 2022 to May 2023. The total cost of investment is $807,000 to $1.3 million, including the franchise fee. Three franchise locations are currently in development, with 18 more sold in multi-unit agreements.
In his years working as a consultant with many franchised brands, he’s grown keenly aware of the tension that often exists between franchisors and their franchisees, and has worked on both sides of the fence. That allowed him to learn where the breakdowns and disappointments occurred in those relationships, which is helping to shape how Taffer interacts with his own partners and how to avoid those same mistakes. “I’ve been very comfortable in this process, because of all those years of experience of seeing what a good franchisor was, how they blew it, how their community reacted when they blew it. I got to live all those things before I became one … so I think I had a little advantage,” Taffer admits.
“I think we went at being a franchisor with a set of knowledge and experience and political sensitivity that most new franchisors don’t have, and I think it served us well,” he adds. “Our franchisees are our friends. We’re very close with them, we work day-to-day with them. Their success means everything to us. My brand means everything to me.”
