Who Owns Stonewood Grill - T-Tees - Your Answers Await, Life's Questions Unraveled

Attention to detail is the key to the longevity of Stonewood Grill & Tavern, a restaurant chain that recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, said L. Gale Lemerand, chairman of Stonewood Holdings (at right) and Steve Papero, the company

ORMOND BEACH — Contemplating the 20-year milestone of the original Stonewood Grill & Tavern, one of the popular restaurant chain’s founders recalls that he envisioned such longevity when he first considered the project.

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“We wanted to be the best in town,” said L. Gale Lemerand, 85, chairman of Daytona Beach-based Stonewood Holdings, parent company for the Stonewood Grill and Peach Valley Cafe chains as well as the newer Coastal Grill & Raw Bar that opened in December in Port Orange. “We expected great things out of this.”

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Stonewood Grill celebrated its 20th anniversary with a community appreciation event this past week at the original restaurant, 100 S. Atlantic Ave., in Ormond Beach.

The original restaurant became the flagship of an operation that grew to include seven additional Stonewood restaurants through Florida (including another in Daytona Beach), six Peach Valley Cafés and the Coastal Grill in Port Orange. In addition, Lemerand, apart from Stonewood Holdings, also is co-owner in five Houligan’s sports grill restaurants in Volusia and Flagler counties.

The secret to that success?

“It’s people,” Lemerand said. “I wrote a book once called ‘To Win In Business, Bet On the Jockey.’ The jockey is even more important than the horse. He runs the race. You can have a great location and everything else, but it all starts with the people.”

In the notoriously demanding restaurant industry, reaching the 20-year milestone is an increasingly rare feat, said Costa Magoulas, dean of the College of Hospitality and Culinary Management at Daytona State College.

“Twenty years? That’s saying something,” Magoulas said. “You really have to be good to last that long. You have to be consistent in the quality of food, consistent in the quality of service and the way you take care of your customers. They must be very happy for them to come back again and again.”

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For Lemerand, customer satisfaction is the result of attention to detail, ranging from the hospitality and service provided by restaurant hosts, hostesses, bartenders, chefs and busboys to a constant search for new recipe ideas to add to the menu.

“We have a test kitchen on Granada, behind the Peach Valley,” Lemerand said. “Our chef is always coming up with new recipes and we have a tasting bar where the management team, our employees and even sometimes our restaurant customers try them out.”

Promising dishes are first added to a blackboard at the restaurant as daily specials and then potentially considered as permanent menu additions, he said.

‘They did everything right’

For a restaurant company that has built its reputation on the consistency of its fine dining, the business partnership that launched Stonewood was initially forged over a meal that went wrong.

READ: Stonewood chain had unusual start

In the late 1990s, Steve Papero, now Stonewood’s president and CEO, was the director of concept development at Darden Restaurants’ Olive Garden division when he met Lemerand for dinner at his home. The two were joined by Doug Sullivan, a former executive at Darden and Outback Steakhouses who also would become one of Stonewood’s founding executives.

The two veteran restaurateurs were unimpressed with the steak dinner prepared by Lemerand, an entrepreneur whose background was in insulation installation, not the restaurant business. Asked by the host for a review of the meal, Papero was bold enough to be honest.

“I told him the steak was beyond overcooked and the special sauce was more broken than anything I’d seen,” Papero recalls. “I said, ‘Other than that, the wine is really good and I like the company.’”

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Lemerand, as it turns out, liked the honesty. He and Papero launched a business partnership that has lasted more than 20 years, although Sullivan eventually sold his ownership stake and moved on to other restaurant chains elsewhere in the country.

The Stonewood chain’s first location opened in 1999 along A1A in Ormond Beach, where it has endured as one of the area’s landmark dining destinations. In 2017, the company opened a Daytona Beach location on the site of the former Vince Carter’s restaurant at LPGA Boulevard and Interstate 95.

The company’s new seafood-oriented concept, Coastal Grill, debuted in December in Port Orange on the site of the former Stonewood restaurant that had closed months earlier for an extensive makeover.

READ: Stonewood restaurant owners’ new concept Coastal Grill opens Monday in Port Orange

The company’s longevity is a result of meticulous planning and research that began long before the first Stonewood opened the doors, Magoulas said.

“They spent almost a year in the planning stages, looking at menus across the state, bringing in an executive chef to test recipes until they came up with the ones they were happy with,” Magoulas said.

“They did everything right,” Magoulas said. “They did surveys about clientele, their needs and what people wanted. They followed all those guidelines before they opened the door. If you do it right, you’re going to be successful, but a lot of places don’t do that; they don’t do their homework.”

Magoulas also credits Stonewood for adapting its menu for changing times.

“If you look at their menu now, it’s not the same as 20 years ago,” he said. “They have changed the menu, updated it. They added the seafood to it and made it a major part of the restaurant. They are on top of the market and they see what the trends are. Markets change, demographics change. They are smart enough that they have kept up with that.”

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Building blocks

Papero acknowledges that the restaurant business has evolved in many ways over two decades.

“So much has changed when you look at social media, the food channels, expectations and knowledge that customers have, what people want from a dining experience,” Papero said. “One thing that has not changed is our founding principles and the culture of our company. These are the building blocks that have stood the test of time and will not be compromised.”

For Stonewood those principles are based on the concepts of “hospitality, kindness and care,” Papero said. It’s an idea he expresses with the acronym SEE, for Simple Enduring Excellence, he said.

That notion is reflected in the company’s workforce, a staff that boasts numerous longtime employees including at least one who has worked at the original restaurant since opening day, he said.

“We hire culture first and train the skills,” Papero said. “Those skills will change, how we go about blocking and tackling, as I like to say, will change. We hire culture and train, train and re-train skills.”

That formula has made Stonewood a vanguard of Volusia County’s restaurant scene, Magoulas said.

“What they have done is set the benchmark for a certain level of expertise in a restaurant,” he said.

Looking ahead, the company’s leaders are optimistic.

“With the Coastal brand, it has been close to seven months now and we’ve definitely been well received by the Port Orange community,” Papero said. “We want to continue to grow within those four walls before we make a decision to expand, but we’re very optimistic.”

Likewise, the company’s Peach Valley Café brand, established 17 years ago, is poised for expansion, Papero said. “We’re not sure what it would look like yet, but it has been well received in the neighborhoods here. We feel very fortunate.”