![[The Brinker Touch]](images/brinkertouch.jpg)
THE BRINKER TOUCH
by Terry Canup
This article appeared in the Winter 1996 issue of New Mexico Resources.Culinary dilettantes are not in short supply in the restaurant industry, but one of the nation's most influential restauranteurs is anything but. The effect of Norman Brinker, a plain-talking native of the Pecos Valley, on the eating landscape radiates from the night sky of any American town. Burger King, Steak and Ale, Chili's Southwest Grill, Jack In The Box, Bennigan's, and more of the nation's eateries all have prospered with Brinker's touch.
His career has gone from a single Brink's Coffee Shop to Brinker International, a company of five restaurant chains with 500 locations and 60,000 employees. On the way, he started his own innovative restaurant chain and led Pillsbury's restaurant operations. Brinker earned the reputation of having a golden touch, based largely on his management philosophies with a homespun flavor.
Raised in the Depression on a 10-acre homestead in the Berrendo area near Roswell, Brinker's family pulled together a living by fattening cattle and piecing together odd jobs. Fiercely independent, Brinker's father once contemptuously tore a government subsidy check to shreds before his son's eyes. Not surprisingly, Brinker went on to be an independent-minded entrepreneur who was never afraid of the unknown.
As a child in the Pecos Valley, he earned his earliest money picking cotton, delivering newspapers, and irrigating alfalfa. By age 14, he had started and liquidated a rabbitry and dog kennel business. He proudly recalls that he never needed to ask his parents for financial support after that. With savings, he bought 14 horses while still in school and began a business training and selling horses.
His love of horses led him to take up jumping, winning every open competition he entered in 1949. He won a spot on the 1952 U.S. Olympic equestrian team and continued competing internationally for several years, even while he served in the Navy.
Brinker moved to California in 1955, with a year at New Mexico Military Institute under his belt. He was ready to begin a career that paralleled the nation's changing post-war eating habits from predominantly home dining to eating out as often as not. Brinker was a pioneer of economical fine dining, epitomized by his early enterprise with the Steak and Ale chain.
Brinker spawned strategies on the restaurant floor by talking to customers and picking up on the nuances of their lives. One of his latest innovations with Brinker's International is to offer different fare in different restaurants at the same street intersection. Customers tired of Italian fare can walk across the street and, perhaps, choose one Brinker restaurant over another.
His advice to NMSU's hospitality and tourism services students when he visited the campus in May to receive an honorary doctorate, was to find an honest, ethical organization with a good training program that does a good business. Doing a good business depends on offering quality at a good price.
The five-fold increase in the amount of spices consumed by Americans bodes well for New Mexico dining, he says, if restaurants don't insist on serving spicy-hot fare. But few of Brinker's restaurants are likely to be built in the state as he must fill 700 to 1,000 seats every day in his restaurants to recoup the $2 million-plus start-up costs.
Brinker offers many inspiring ideas on leadership to the readers of his 1996 book On the Brink. The book, however, shows that little can replace a zest for life that led Brinker to hold board meetings from his hospital bed or fight back from a crippling horse accident and the loss of his first wife, tennis star Maureen Connally, to cancer.
Through it all, Brinker's touch has been a touch for enthusiastically pleasing the customer.