Celebrity Restaurants Turn on the Heat

The number of celebrity restaurants from 2020 to 2021 at a time where overall US restaurant openings only increased by 13%

Houston rapper Bun B turned his passion for making smash burgers at home into Trill Burgers. Former NFL quarterback Drew Brees is a Jimmy John’s franchise owner and invests in Walk-On’s Sports Bistreaux and Smalls Sliders. Comedians Pete Davidson and Jason Sudeikis, musician Mark Ronson and actors Nicholas Braun and Justin Theroux are all investors in New York’s Pebble Bar, located steps away from the 30 Rockefeller Plaza studio where Saturday Night Live films. And after years of eating salads and drinks from Health Nut, Kris Jenner signed on as an investor to help the chain expand beyond Southern California.

These are among the 361 celebrity restaurants that have opened in the US and Canada in the past five years, according to JLL. But it wasn’t until 2021 when such openings really took off, doubling from 2020 to 2021 at a time where overall US restaurant openings only increased by 13%. Some of this can be attributed to the overall trajectory the restaurant industry is on: There were 1,832 new US planned restaurants openings announced in the first quarter of 2024 alone. But the spurt in celebrity restaurant growth is also due to the star power that accompanies these investments.

JLL notes that with a US retail vacancy rate at 4.1%, the competition for restaurant space is high and availability is low. Landlords receive many inquires for each vacant space and one way to increase the likelihood of a returned call is to have a famous name behind the food.

But once the introductions are over, landlords get down to business quickly and vet these restaurants like any other. They want to know, for example, that the restaurant has the money

to support the build-out and obligations of the lease and they want to see an executive team with a track record of success with this or other concepts. Perhaps most paramount, the concept must fit in with their vision of the neighborhood or development.

“We are seeing that restaurants are becoming an identity to the building they are in,” Chris Angelone, JLL’s Senior Managing Director, Retail Capital Markets, said at a ICSC breakfast panel Monday. “And a lot of landlords are controlling that space or producing other inventive ideas like using a license agreement, owning equipment or liquor license. This helps them reinvent the space more easily, when they need to.”

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