September 28, 2017

Check out the Backyard Steak Big Plate at Tender Greens in California

Local Stories

RestaurantInterviews

Today we’d like to introduce you to California’s Tender Greens.

How did you end up in the restaurant business?
We started our careers as chefs. My partners and I met at a luxury hotel in Santa Monica. We were at a point in our careers where we were tired of the corporate life and wanted to have more influence over our own future and destiny. That’s when we came up with the idea for Tender Greens and decided to leave our corporate jobs working for someone else. We tested recipes, menu items, raised money from our family and friends to open our own restaurant. In 2006, we opened the first Tender Greens restaurant on an up-and-coming street in Culver City. On opening day there was a line around the block and we ran out of food by 7 p.m. The next day, more people showed up and the lines went out the door again, and the lines have never stopped. We hit a nerve in LA food culture at the time.

When we opened Tender Greens, we came up with the concept because there was nothing else like it at the time. There was either the high-end fine dining world that we came from or fast food. We appreciated the high-quality ingredients and chef technique that we became accustomed to from fine dining but we couldn’t afford to eat the food that we were cooking. So that’s where Tender Greens was born – the idea that you can eat an incredible dish prepared by a chef, using the best quality ingredients, at a price that you can enjoy every day, in an environment that’s nice enough for a night out or a quick bite.

As we grew and added more stores, we hired more chefs like us to run them. We taught them how to become business owners and entrepreneurs, just like we learned when we opened our first restaurant. And we still do that today. Every Tender Greens location is run by its own executive chef, and they’re all company owned.

We’d love to learn more about the struggles you’ve had along the way.
It wasn’t easy. Still isn’t. Running restaurants, and scaling the concept is never easy and it becomes increasingly more complex the larger we grow. But it is rewarding to watch an idea grow into a restaurant, then into multiple restaurants, into a company with over 1,000 team members, and that we’ve had so much influence on the food scene and other restaurateurs who have been inspired to open their own place because of our story.

Scaling up is the hardest challenge. Running one restaurant in Culver City while opening a second restaurant in San Diego was so challenging at the time. We had never two restaurants before! We overcame it because we had a chef team in San Diego we trusted completely. And we trusted each other. Now with 24 restaurants and growing scaling our boutique style and sourcing philosophy is still one of our biggest challenges because we’re unwilling to compromise on our quality and the reputation we’ve built.

Tell us something interesting or unique about Tender Greens.
We’re unique because our chefs create 48 different dishes every day. No two locations are alike, each chef makes a daily special – twice a day. It’s amazing to see our talented chefs take the same ingredient and turn it into 48 completely different dishes. For example, we recently had sustainable farmed Baja Kanpachi (yellowtail) in our restaurants. During the entire weekend there were totally innovative, delicious and craveable dishes at every restaurant that you couldn’t get anywhere else. If you’re visiting our restaurant, get whatever is on the Daily Special’s board. You won’t regret it.

That’s where you’ll find the “hard to find dishes” sometimes our chefs will make dihes with a whole goat, or using frog’s legs, or octopus. At Tender Greens, you can enjoy a dish that is recognizable and comforting, like our steak big plate with mashed potatoes, or be totally adventurous and try something different.

Most Popular Items

Backyard Steak Big Plate

grilled flank steak with Yukon Gold mashed potatoes and side veggies or simple salad
Happy Vegan

Four different grain salads in one – Green Hummus, Farro wheat and cranberry grain salad, tabbouleh, red and black quinoa with beets, with a simple salad with sherry vinaigrette.
Dietary: Vegan

Tuna Nicoise

A classic tuna nicoise salad with wild line caught MSC certified Albacore tuna, green beans, potatoes, olives, tomatoes, quail eggs, capers and a sherry vinaigrette.
Dietary: Gluten-free