Meet the former Raising Cane’s COO helping fuel LI restaurant expansions

National restaurant chains have known for decades that Long Island is a competitive market, with many avoiding Nassau and Suffolk counties altogether.

“They know that Long Islanders have an immense loyalty to their local restaurants,” explained Kathleen Wood, a former president and COO of Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, a national sensation of a fast-food chain founded in 1996.

Through her Kathleen Wood Partners, a growth strategy firm, Wood is now a major driving force behind the rapid growth of several Long Island food service brands, such as Tap Room, Bango Bowls, Toast Coffee + Kitchen and others.

She likens the current Long Island restaurant scene to that of Baton Rouge, La., some 20 years ago, when Raising Cane’s and other concepts that started with a single location began to expand statewide and beyond.

“This is the new era of a region (Long Island) that has become the epicenter of the next generation of great brands,” said Wood, who’s from Chicago but lives in Milwaukee.

For music lovers, think of Seattle’s grunge scene in the early 1990s. When that first Tap Room or Toast Coffee + Kitchen opens across state lines, it will mark the region’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” moment. 

That’s when the rest of the country starts to find out, and experience Long Island at the bar and in the booths.

Brands such as Tap Room, Toast, Bango Bowls, Dirty Taco & Tequila and The Pizzeria, which Wood all named specifically, though not all are her clients, are helping lead that charge. “There are a lot of them,” she said.

“On full service, the whole game is being rewritten now,” she said. “There was a shift happening in the industry before COVID, where … Gen Z was coming in with a more digitally forward experience and a different type of palette. They didn’t want to eat where their parents or grandparents were eating. They also grew up eating more diverse food.”

So, in short, the experience of a TGI Friday’s wasn’t what the late-teens and 20-somethings were looking for.

Then a global pandemic happened.

“There was already a shift toward digital ordering but COVID pushed that from not five years away, but right away,” Wood said. “So you had this confluence of the changing consumer and technology, and then you had a global pandemic where you had these large square footprints where nobody could even come inside.

“While they were trying to figure all that out, you had small, more agile companies gaining market share because they were well-positioned for it.”

Opportunity arises in any economy, she said, but a brand needs to be agile, nimble and have a plan in place.

“When I think about Tap Room and Toast and Bango Bowls, that’s exactly what they’re doing,” she said. “There’s a shift in the marketplace and now Long Island is going to be introducing their own Long Island chains to the nation and that is just incredible.”

One of her client’s, Terence Scarlatos, founded Toast Coffee + Kitchen in Port Jefferson in 2002 and today counts four locations across Nassau and Suffolk: Port Jefferson Station, Patchogue, Bay Shore and Long Beach.

He’s now looking to build a dozen on Long Island and even more beyond.

Scarlatos said he had long dreamed of mega-scaling his smash-hit concept. But the idea of it was simply overwhelming. Until he met Wood.

“Kathy had all the tools and showed me exactly how to delegate responsibilities, and put ‘aces in their places,’ as she says,” Scarlatos shared. “I got to breathe a little bit and began working on the business, instead of in the business.

“From there I’ve been able to scale.”

“She is a diamond,” he added. “I guess my secret weapon is no longer a secret.”

It’s all about the founders’ vision, Wood said.

Vision means that someone, somewhere believed in something so strongly that they were willing to put everything on the line for it.

So when that works and you’re looking to scale, if you lose the vision, you’ll lose everything.

It’s the vision that succeeded, and the only true vehicle for growing a brand.

“When we can codify that founders’ vision and their values and their non-negotiables, you can put that into the DNA of the business when it’s small by integrating it into the customer experience journey, the employee experience journey,” Wood said.

“In every step of the process, as the company grows, its systems, standards, measurements, all that then grows within the DNA of the organization.”

Then you start making those executive hires.

James Bonanno, a co-founder of the growing Tap Room chain that now counts seven locations on Long Island with two more on the way, said casting a vision was one of the first things the Tap Room founders did when they started working with Wood.

“[It’s] one of the most important things you can do when growing a business, as it helps you align your partners, if you have them, and your team,” he said. “It has been very instrumental in our growth over the past few years.”

Wood also sees in her growing list of Long Island clients a desire to win.

“They’re prepared to win. They’re driven to win,” she said.

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