![]() On the drawing board are six more and seven new “affiliates”-restaurants in which Harris has a stake. This fall, he will be opening one Francesca’s in Scottsdale, Arizona, one in San Diego, California (plus a Davanti Enoteca in that city’s well-established Little Italy neighborhood), and one in Raleigh, North Carolina. Harris has hired Reconstruction Partners to help him as he begins a national expansion of his signature restaurant. The second look is a proposal from Reconstruction Partners, a Nashville-based management team whose claim to fame is the franchising and expansion of Sonic, a chain of drive-ins. The first look is indicative of Harris’s winning formula: great Italian food at reasonable prices, with a helping of homey charm. The first menu looks like it belongs in an Italian trattoria the other looks like it could be found in a franchised restaurant in Anytown, USA. The handwriting has been replaced with a script font, and a black-and-red collage of women’s faces borders the page. It is also a broadsheet with the same food items. ![]() Then he picks up a spec design for a new Francesca menu. This broadsheet, with a narrow black-and-white image of a beguiling woman’s face at the top, has half of the culinary offerings printed by hand. Rather, it is the graphic design of the menu that is making him pause.įirst he examines the long-established template that is used in all 20 of the Francesca venues in Chicago and the suburbs-plus an outpost in Madison, Wisconsin. ![]() And today he’s already ordered lunch-carpaccio and a half order of gnocchi-so, for once, the food isn’t capturing his attention. He could recite this menu in his sleep, since he created it for his first restaurant, Mia Francesca, in 1992. After all, Harris, 50, is a Chicago restaurant mogul, the owner and executive chef of the Chicago-based Francesca restaurant chain, as well as a partner in multiple other local eateries, including the highly praised Davanti Enoteca and The Purple Pig. At a table at Francesca’s on Chestnut, Scott Harris-his six-foot-one, 300-pound frame decked out in shorts and a sports shirt-is hunkered down, intensely studying the menu.
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