20
Mercersbu rg magazi n e wi nter 2009–2010
Todd Hovenden’s restaurants have a bigcity feel and smallertown roots By Lee Owen
Cooked to Order
Bloomington, Illinois, is an average-size city planted firmly in the middle of middle America. It serves as home base for State Farm Insurance, Beer Nuts, and Biaggi’s Ristorante Italiano, an award-winning, upscale-casual Italian restaurant chain founded and run by Todd Hovenden ’84. Biaggi’s has 21 locations in 12 states stretching from New York to Utah. Most are in midsize markets like Fort Wayne, Indiana; West Des Moines, Iowa; or Colorado Springs. The chain’s roots and strategy are more Madison, Wisconsin (where it opened a store in 2000), than Madison Avenue—and that’s on purpose. “We’ve had what I call a ‘hit ’em where they ain’t’ strategy,” says Hovenden, a former Mercersburg swimmer and Taco Bell executive who opened the first Biaggi’s in Bloomington in 1999. “Look at Wal-Mart, the biggest retailer in the world. When WalMart started, J.C. Penney and Sears and Kmart were already in existence—but they said they weren’t going to touch the small towns. We’re obviously not modeled after Wal-Mart, but we had a similar strategy. “I had some successful restaurateurs tell me, ‘Todd, those folks down there don’t want a Biaggi’s; they’ve already got Olive Garden and T.G.I. Friday’s and Bennigan’s.’ These are big-city people, and they kind of saw people in some of these smaller towns as hicks. Lucky for us, nobody in any of the big cities wanted to drive through the corn and bean fields to get to a pretty cool little town like Bloomington.” Having lived in places like Bloomington and smaller—he came to Mercersburg
from Grinnell, Iowa (population 8,000)—Hovenden knew there were plenty of doctors, insurance agents, and business owners in smaller markets to support quality, moderately priced restaurants. “We’re talking about closet chefs: men and women that like to cook and watch the Food Network and read Bon Appétit,” he says. “When they go to Chicago or New York, they plan weeks ahead of time what restaurants they’re going to. They’re foodies. I said, ‘There’s a market for us in these towns.’” In July 2009, Consumer Reports named Biaggi’s (www.biaggis.com) the top Italian chain restaurant in America—ahead of the likes of Maggiano’s Little Italy, Romano’s Macaroni Grill, and Olive Garden. On the road The path to the top for Hovenden stretches from a small steakhouse named Rube’s in tiny Montour, Iowa—where Hovenden says he fell in love with the idea of running a restaurant during his 14th-birthday dinner— to Mercersburg, two Big Ten universities (the University of Iowa and Northwestern University), five years at PepsiCo (Taco Bell’s parent company) that included a stint in newly capitalist Russia developing Taco Bell properties there, and finally a return to the Midwest, from where he launched Biaggi’s.
Todd Hovenden ’84 and his wife, Claudia Bayona Hovenden ’84
Hovenden came to Mercersburg as a oneyear senior and joined what he describes as “maybe the best U.S. high school swim team ever assembled—and certainly not because of me.” Under the direction of legendary coach John Trembley, the Blue Devil swimmers placed first at the Eastern Interscholastic Swimming Championships in 1984. “It seemed like we had the fastest person in America in almost every single event,” says Hovenden, who was an All-American in the 100-yard freestyle but wasn’t among the top four swimmers at Mercersburg in the event—and thus wasn’t part of the school’s 400-yard freestyle relay team. Still, Mercersburg was the site of a memorable victory of sorts for Hovenden; he met his future wife, Claudia Bayona Hovenden ’84, on campus. “We went to Romeo’s [page 26] for pizza on November 11, 1983, and we still go out for pizza every November 11 to this day,” he says. Hovenden went on to swim at Iowa, although a peek into his campus mailbox offered a preview of a future away from the pool. “I wasn’t subscribing to Sports Illustrated or anything like that; instead, I read all the restaurant trade magazines,” he says. “I was always trying to study the industry. Even at Pepsi, I was working in finance