Taking over a long-running, healthy business and maintaining its level of success is a challenge for any business owner.
But trying to grow that business by putting a new spin on it is even more of a gamble, given the risk of potentially alienating longtime customers who often don’t appreciate change.
That’s the task facing Joaquin Garofalo, the new owner of the restaurant formerly known as Joe’s Dining, at 2801 Rodeo Road. Garofalo purchased the eatery earlier this year from longtime owners Roland and Sheila Richter, who made Joe’s a local institution after opening it in 2002.
Since then, Garofalo has worked to put a new twist on the business, walking a delicate line between keeping things familiar enough so that the existing customer base still feels at home while shaking things up enough to convince new folks to give the place a try.
The result is the newly named Joe’s Diner and Pizza, and the adjacent Joe’s Next Door, an addition to the business of an adjoining space. In a story about the business that appears on the business page of today’s edition of The New Mexican, Garofalo explains how he envisions the two spaces serving the market segments he hopes to capture — the legacy Joe’s Dining crowd in the main dining room and the younger, more family-oriented customers in the higher-energy Joe’s Next Door segment. Both spaces will feature the same menu.
It’s a unique, two-restaurants-in-one approach, and I’m eager to see how it works. Garofalo told me he’s already received a little pushback from some Joe’s regulars about the changes, but he’s hoping they’ll keep an open mind.
In any event, it looks as if Garofalo is committed to his different approach and is willing to take a chance on something new. As he said, an ownership transition carries with it an implied tweaking of any operation.
“To have an expectation it’s not going to change, that’s not realistic,” he said.
