How FB Society Is Developing Some of DFW’s Most Successful Restaurants

Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) is a hub for chain restaurants — not only drawing them in, but creating them. Black-Eyed Pea, Steak and Ale, El Chico, Dickey’s, La Madeline, and Pizza Inn all started here. So did Velvet Taco. The quirky taco chain, an idea hatched by Randy Dewitt and Jack Gibbons, became the first restaurant from FB Society (the hospitality group previously known as Front Burner — it changed the name in 2020 due to confusion with another group) to become a wildly successful chain. In the last few years, it’s spread prolifically throughout the state and then outside of Texas after the group sold it to a private equity firm in 2021. It’s a similar case with breastaurant chain Twin Peaks. One of the most successful stories in hospitality right now, it’s predicted that it will make one billion dollars in revenue over the next few years. And that’s the whole idea, Gibbons tells Eater Dallas over lunch in the Ranch in Los Colinas one rainy day. Do the fun part of coming up with the ideas, nurture the brands, and if it becomes a home run, sell it off to someone else to run.

This is an unusual business plan. For most restaurateurs, Gibbons explained over a plate with a juicy double cut pork chop with a carnitas rub that the table shared, the point of coming up with a successful idea is to make it a chain or a franchise, and get other people to run it while you collect the money. Gibbons, who had a 25-year-long career in which he worked his way up from being a server at Pappadeaux in Dallas to the highest echelons of Houston’s Pappas Restaurant group, learned that he’s an “ideas guy.” “At the time, I ran out of mentors at Pappas, and so I went back to college at the University of Dallas, where I got my MBA. I kind of knew I was going to end up running this company,” Gibbons says, because DeWitt was already courting him for a partnership. “Randy kept talking to me about what the market looked like and that there were more opportunities to open independent restaurants in this city.”

That was circa 2008, when the real estate market was crashing, and Dallas suburbs had nothing but chain restaurants. As Gibbons describes it, folks had to drive to Uptown to get an interesting cocktail and meal that wasn’t from Chili’s (a company also created and headquartered in, you guessed it, Dallas). Gibbons and DeWitt, suburban guys with families, wanted to build something, a little selfishly, for themselves. Their first project was the restaurant Gibbons and I were sitting in, the Ranch. It’s one of the only restaurants that FB Society hasn’t duplicated and also a restaurant that most Dallasites haven’t ever eaten at. It is extremely designed to be for the ’burbs.

“The night before we opened the Ranch, Randy goes, ‘What happens if this is not busy?’ And me being the naive person that I tend to be, I was like, ‘That’s never going to happen,’” Gibbons says. “We opened it up, and it was crickets.”

FB Society

Crickets in 2009 turned into a bustling and busy spot by the time the restaurant celebrated its 15th anniversary in 2024. It remains a flagship for the group because its kitchen is where lots of new dish ideas still get tested out. It works because the Ranch has an expansive menu that covers American, Texan, Southwest, and Mexican dishes. Ideas might be exported to Whiskey Cake, Haywire, Son of a Butcher, Sixty Vines, Mexican Sugar, or, if it’s expansive enough, it might become a concept at one of the food halls the group owns — in addition to Legacy Hall in Plano, FB Society has Assembly Food Hall in Nashville and will open a food hall in New York City later this year.

The food halls are another sort of incubator inside this business of restaurant incubators. Son of a Butcher was the first successful export from a food hall with a great backstory. “We had John Tesar, who was the original chef in the food hall [with Knife Burger]. I recruited him, thinking there wasn’t a better guy to run a burger stand,” Gibbons says. “I didn’t work with him day-to-day, but the food hall people did. After a time, his sales declined, he didn’t spend time out there, and the quality diminished. They ended up asking him to leave,” and an unsurprising fight followed, he says. Needing something to take its place, the food hall asked Gibbons to come up with another idea for the stall. Gibbons says he felt bored with burgers but was enchanted by the idea of sliders in the White Castle style. “The name, SOB, kind of came from John Tesar. When you think about how the food hall thought about him, you know — I like him, he’s an interesting guy to have a beer with.” He’s also, clearly, an inspiration.

FB Society

The black eye that’s also a major success in the company’s history is Twin Peaks. Gibbons doesn’t push aside questions about it when asked, but makes it clear that there were four or five restaurants before he joined forces with DeWitt, and that they are firmly not involved with it now. “The last few years that we owned it, we didn’t work on it,” he says. “We had an independent team in a different office that was running the brand.” When the opportunity came to sell it to FAT Brands in 2021, Gibbons said they all agreed it was a “hell yeah.” He calls it a “transaction,” but doesn’t address the problematic nature of operating a restaurant chain that commodifies the bodies of women. As this article went to press, Eater Dallas received a press release from a representative of Twin Peaks touting its recent successes, detailing the opening of nine new restaurants in 2024, singing franchise agreements for 24 new locations, a C-Suite Leaders Award to CEO Joe Hummel from the Dallas Business Journal, hosting a golf tournament that raised $530,000 for the veteran-focused Tunnel to Towers Foundation, that it held a contest to name Miss Twin Peaks 2024, and assembled supplies to contribute to a Dallas-based domestic violence shelter.

While there are food overlaps at FB Society’s various restaurants — each is essentially a similar style of food, and all of them are fairly huge spaces — the “concept” behind each is distinct. Take, for example, Whiskey Cake. With locations in the suburbs surrounding Dallas, Austin, Houston, and actually inside Fort Worth and Oklahoma City, it was the second restaurant the duo created, full of warm woods and masculine energy. In fact, it’s an awful lot like the Ranch, minus any Western elements, save for its focus on sustainability. While the Ranch was created with the idea that the “Dallas” Wild West energy tourists could find in Fort Worth wasn’t available at a location near-ish the airport, Whiskey Cake was created for the suburbs. Gibbons says they “let a craft cocktail guy design the bar,” and he wanted no soda guns — only fresh ingredients, excellent ice, and the correct glasses. “Doing this out in Plano, people’s heads were blown off,” Gibbons says. It may sound rudimentary, but when have you ever had a drink served to you in a thinly rimmed glass at TGI Fridays (another chain that didn’t start in Dallas but sure moved its headquarters here)?

FB Society

FB Society

“When you move the clock forward to today, what we were doing [in 2010] is almost done by every restaurant today,” Gibbons says. Something else Whiskey Cake was ahead on was implementing sustainable measures, some of which are still not standard over a decade later, like having solar panels, repurposed furniture, and gutters that run back into the landscaping where plants aren’t just for decoration but also used as ingredients in the cocktails. Gibbons says that when they took over the original restaurant space, they took all the silverware to a welder, who used the forks to create a massive fork-shaped sculpture. Eventually, it became one of the first restaurants in DFW to install electric car chargers. “Plano doesn’t have, and didn’t at the time time, recycling services for restaurants, so there were barriers to getting where we wanted to go,” he says.

Elements of this go back to the Ranch, where the staff reuses wine bottles as water bottles, and at Whiskey Cake, where they do the same and also brand wine boxes with the restaurant logo to use as coasters. Toying with the idea of repurposing things led to Sixty Vines, where wines are kegged — but getting there with vineyards took some time. “We would go to Aspen Food and Wine to talk to the winemakers, and they’re like, ‘We don’t want to keg. We don’t want to do screwoff corks.’ It was hard.” Sixty Vines could have easily looked just like the Ranch and Whiskey Cake, but the design and culinary teams pushed them in another direction. Gibbons says they originally wanted to implement barrels and heavy wood with rusty steel in the decor, but the teams suggested restraint, pushing them in a contemporary direction where shiny, thin steel kegs, subway tiles, and smooth lines would allow the wines to be the center of attention. That carried through to the menus, where dishes are simple enough to let the ingredients be the star. At Whiskey Cake, that can look like making goat cheese fondue with locally sourced goat cheese, ordering a giant 24-ounce bone-in ribeye that came from nearby 44 Farms, or getting a bowl of Farmer’s Market Soup that makes use of all the leftover locally sourced produce instead of tossing it out.

FB Society

Flash forward to today, and Sixty Vines has perhaps the biggest expansion within FB Society, with locations in Texas in DFW, Houston, and Austin areas, and other states including Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.

Gibbons says a lot of FB Society’s strategy when it comes to restaurants model those of the real estate industry: “When something works, does it deserve to grow?” Gibbons asks. “Where does the second and third location go?” It’s a process he says they’ve refined throughout the years. “In some [restaurants], there have been big gaps of lack of growth and in others they’ve gone quickly.”

One of its slower growers is Ida Clare, the popular Southern food spot in Addison that used to be a Truluck’s (it has a second location in San Antonio). Tucked away off the tollway, it has a “if you know, you know” feel. It’s the kind of place where you can order fried chicken and macaroni, the dinner menu is called “supper,” and the bartenders have vinyl hours where they play strictly records of their choice. The dining room feels like a nicer version of the Black-Eyed Pea — communal, busy, and hallmarked by the smells of home cooking — with a menu to rival any local restaurant yet the food still feels accessible and easy for any Texan. Gibbons got more involved in the restaurant a few years ago and, along with the leadership team, started refining the menu to feature more fresh vegetables to be in line with what restaurant culture is doing more broadly. Dishes like that excellent fried chicken and Gulf shrimp and grits send diners back to childhood, while the appetizer sampler served on a lazy Susan adds some whimsy to the meal. Much of the seafood is from the Gulf, with a few Atlantic items, and all the menu items are updated now to reflect ingredients that are in season.

FB Society

FB Society

“When I walk into [Ida’s], the different staff members feel like they were curated for the brand. They just fit with colored hair, piercings, tattoos — people who have an independent, maverick streak are just who work there,” Gibbons says. But it’s not something you can actually curate — more of a, “if you build it, they will come” scenario. Ida’s has become the FB Society restaurant that skews younger and has the strongest personality, Gibbons says.

Haywire is another restaurant that spawned from the DNA of the Ranch. Gibbons animatedly rants about how, while building the Ranch, he and his partners studied other restaurants to see who was the “local” restaurant focused on sourcing local food and creating “a real Texan menu.” “From a food standpoint, it’s amazing how all these ‘Texas’ restaurants will open up, but they have salmon and lobster on their menu,” he says with a laugh. “Hello! The person making these [menus] is some celebrity chef from Las Vegas, and those are not items that come from Texas.” At Haywire, the menu tells you exactly where in Texas the food came from and which local ranchers and farmers the restaurant partnered with. Everything from the cheese (Dublin) to the cutting boards (Allen) is accounted for. Order a petite filet from Broken Arrow Ranch in Ingram; a plate of mini elk tacos with tortillas made at La Mexicana Tortilla Factory in Duncanville; or a dessert with ice cream from Henry’s in Plano.

The idea bloomed to create a modern Texas restaurant that wasn’t disingenuous. In came Haywire. Where the Ranch leans into that Western feeling, Haywire has what Gibbons calls “a Marfa vibe.” Sleek and sophisticated without sacrificing the signifiers of Texas, there’s wood, the Texas flag, and fire pits — just with all the rough edges sanded down. “It doesn’t feel like a restaurant that belongs in Plano, but they deserve it. They support it,” Gibbons says.

FB Society

FB Society

The restaurant came into view when a company developing the Legacy West shopping center approached FB Society wanting “something cool” in the area for its 2017 opening. The original Haywire tacked on to Legacy Hall, the food hall that anchors the upscale shopping complex, featuring a first-floor food hall, a bar on the second and third floors, and an outdoor box garden that doubles as a live music venue. Its inspiration came from Chelsea Market in New York City, where cool vendors offer a plethora of cuisines. Unlike most shopping complexes, a big department store isn’t the anchor — the food hall is. “It’s the first time in the country something like that has been done in that way, in a brand new development,” Gibbons says. While the food hall business has been more of a slow burn for FB Society, Haywire has been prolific in Texas, with locations in Dallas’s Uptown neighborhood, San Antonio, a recent opening in Houston, and a new outpost headed for Austin.

Also on brand: “None of them are cookie cutter,” Gibbons says. Nestled in the tiny but busy Memorial neighborhood west of the city, the Houston location features floor-to-ceiling glass walls and a glassed-in party barn, while its San Antonio outpost, located in the high-end La Cantera outdoor mall, is blanketed with woven Western tapestries and a ceiling mural that depicts the cattle trail.“That’s the vision of this brand. While there are common brand elements, I want all of them to feel different, unique, not the same.”

And such a goal requires the restaurant group to think outside the box. Instead of opening restaurants in the city and exporting them out, as most operators do, FB Society is known to launch in the suburbs, namely Plano, before following up with second locations in Dallas. “It’s because we’re not going after a crowd that can only afford to eat there for a special occasion. Our business model is to create a special environment, a special food experience, and give good value,” he says. “I’m in it for the long haul.”