Veteran operator David Bubbus Sr. elevates the fast-service experience
Anyone who wishes to capture what David Bubbus Sr. does on any given day is advised to bring comfortable shoes. The lifelong restauranteur, who, with his son, David “Alan” Bubbus, Jr., created and grew David’s Burgers into one of Arkansas’ most-beloved native chains, does not do well sitting still.
In fact, during a sudden rush of customers at one of his restaurants, Bubbus seemed to be everywhere at once. He weaves through the open kitchen, where he hails employees by name and remembers a personal tidbit or just asks about their day, all while moving. In the dining room, he is a hummingbird host, moving from table to table and customer to customer, feeding off of what they tell him. From the satisfied tables, he takes a smile, but the ones for whom the service has fallen below his standards sends him on a beeline directly to the nearest employee to address.
It is only a burger and fries on the plate, as he readily acknowledges, but the customer experience is pure gold. They do not call it the hospitality industry for nothing, and even if many such places these days seem to have forgotten that, David’s Burgers is not one of them.
“Service is more important than the kitchen,” Bubbus said. “The food part is so simple. I mean, right here, we cook burgers and fries. Anybody can do that. The restaurant business is more about service than it is the food.”
Do not misunderstand: Bubbus is very, very keen on the product David’s Burgers serves and for which it has been voted among the best in Arkansas in multiple polls, including AY About You’s Best Of through the years. Trained in the art of meat cutting from an early age, he takes great pride in the fact the company maintains high standards all along its supply chain of high-quality beef — U.S. Choice chuck, a largely unheard-of ingredient in quick-service restaurant hamburgers — right down to the pasture.
After custom processing animals in Searcy, sides are cut, trimmed and ground fresh in the company’s USDA-inspected central facility, from whence it is delivered to restaurants, along with all the freshly sliced toppings. Bubbus is so particular about the resulting burgers, in fact, that he had a special device created by which kitchen employees form the ideal patty without heavy handing the meat to mealy mush.
David, left, and Alan Bubbus at the groundbreaking of the Searcy location.
(Photo provided by David’s Burgers)
The fact that Bubbus considers all that the easy part tells a person how important the people side of the equation is to the company’s success and how deliberate management is when hiring and honing customer service skills.
“We really encourage a fast walk,” Bubbus said with a wry, “Know what I mean?” grin. “Fast walk creates energy, and if you’re smiling and walking fast, good stuff happens. If we see somebody that’s not walking fast, we coach them on it. They don’t learn how to do it — we let them walk home.”
If that sounds like an oversimplified business plan in a brutally competitive business with a lot of moving parts, Bubbus has decades of success across multiple restaurant concepts to back him up. Breaking things down into simple components a team can latch onto and do exceptionally well beats an overcomplicated formula any day to his way of thinking. It is a strategy that hearkens back to his earliest jobs and the people he grew up around.
“My dad died when I was 9 months old, and he worked at the White Eagle Cafe [in North Little Rock] on Washington Avenue back in the 1930s and ’40s,” he said. “That was the place to eat back in the day. Next door to the White Eagle Cafe was Jacobs Meat Market, owned by the old man, Al Jacobs.
“Well, it just happened that after my dad died, my older siblings bought us a little house in Levy, and it just happened that Johnny Jacobs, Al’s son, opened a meat market on 35th and Camp Robinson Road, a block away from our house. I grew up in that meat market; I was kind of like a mascot. I’d hang out down there, and they’d put an apron on me and a little hat and take a picture. There’s a picture of that somewhere that was in their ad in the newspaper that I’d love to find.”
By age 12, Bubbus rivaled most of the other meat cutters in the store, earning the nickname Butcher Boy. By 16, he commanded a potent repertoire of master butcher, natural upseller and an expert in the art of engaging the customer.
“I worked at the meat market with guys who were really good at that,” he said. “In the old days, we waited on all the customers, of course. If the customer had a roast, they’d wind up selling them the roast and 3 pounds of hamburger and five or six pork chops. I was just a kid, you know, working the counter at 9, 10 years old, listening to them. I guess I just picked it up from them.”
Photo by Dwain Hebda.
Bubbus entered the restaurant business, and in 1963, at age 19, he was managing JaMar restaurant in Pine Bluff. Four years later, he would have a place of his own in town, the groundbreaking El Matador, which was an early pioneer for Tex-Mex fare in Arkansas.
Another notable part of his career was creating Chicken Country, a fast-service restaurant he franchised into about 70 locations in Arkansas and Texas starting in the late 1960s.
“Well, I really didn’t intend to do [franchises],” he said. “We opened the first one up, and people just came up, wanting to buy franchises. My nephew bought one. I sold one to a car dealer, an old buddy of mine, who put it next to his car lot. A guy from Monticello wanted to buy one and then a guy from Hot Springs, and it just went nuts. I sold 12 the first year.”
As a restaurant business model, franchising was relatively new — the first franchise locations for Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s were just a little more than a decade old — leaving Bubbus to figure it out as he went.
“We had our own commissary, like we do now. We serviced everything,” he said. “The chicken back then used to be delivered in ice packing and a wooden box — very messy. We cut the chicken up on-site, distributed all the paper goods, kept the menu to very few food items.”
Bubbus could not have known it at the time, but many of the same operational concepts would carry over later to David’s Burgers, the brainchild of his son, who, after graduating from law school, had up to then had a career as a bank appraiser. The two have made for an ideal partnership ever since, even if the senior’s voice of experience and the younger’s corporate mentality sometimes clashed.
Family lore includes the younger’s opposition to the endless fries served tableside for fear people would not order a combo knowing hot fries were coming around for free. The elder insisted people were more honorable than that, and sure enough, endless fries became an effective part of the David’s Burgers brand.
Then there is the menu — primarily comprised of burgers, a grilled chicken sandwich, fries and a grilled cheese — which takes its cue from the Chicken Country days.
Photo by Dwain Hebda.
“I’ve always thought if you can figure out something that’s tasty and simple that you can repeat without having to have chefs on the staff, it would work, and it has,” Bubbus said. “[Alan] had never really worked in a restaurant. We opened the first door, and he said, ‘We need to add a hot dog to the menu.’
“I went off, and the end of the conversation was, ‘You don’t know enough to know what in the hell you don’t know. You can’t even do what we’re doing now.’”
At that, Bubbus let out a big laugh, and his tone turned warm.
“He’s a special guy, he works hard, and I’m very blessed to have him,” he said. “It’s worked out really well.”
Initial hiccups aside, David’s Burgers has been an unqualified success, growing to 10 Arkansas locations and about 400 employees, Bubbus said. Each store is decked out with blown-up family photos, giving diners the feel of a Bubbus family reunion, which is not too far off the mark — several of his grandkids have learned the facts of business life at his elbow.
That familial attitude extends to the communities the restaurants serve, as well. True to its hometown roots, the company is deeply invested in charitable causes and local events, supporting organizations ranging from foster children and adoption to veterans and neighborhood ball teams. In a very real way, every one of the company’s employees is also a community service project of a sort, many of them on first jobs and all of them gaining skills they can apply no matter where their careers and lives lead.
“There are things that, if you learn them at an early age, you’ve got a head start on everybody,” Bubbus said. “If you can look somebody in the face and talk to them and smile at them and make their day a little better, you’ve got an advantage in life. We have a lot of parents come in and tell us, ‘When my daughter gets old enough, we want her to work here.’ I hear that all day. You notice a lot of our kids are just kids, but they’re the right kind.
“A lot of our kids, they work here for a few years and go to college. I talked to a lady the other day. She’s probably 27 or 28 years old, and she’s an attorney here in town. She worked here all the way through college and high school. Any field you go into, you’re going to be confronted with people, and if you can build a relationship with them, there’s nothing more important in life than the relationships you build.”
As in every life, not everything panned out for Bubbus during his long career, but instincts, experience and a plain old-fashioned gift for the business have combined for an entrepreneurial batting average high enough to let him know he is a lucky man — not that the last chapter of this Arkansas success story has even been written yet. At 80, he is still churning out new ideas such as the recently launched David’s Premium Beef, a line of fresh protein bundles and luxury aged steaks that closes the circle on the Butcher Boy from upstart meat cutter to the restaurant elder statesman he is today.
Talking about the newest venture, Bubbus was effervescent and barely able to contain the master salesman within. Imparting some closing cooking tips for one of the beautiful aged ribeyes, his words touch the listener’s senses, describing both sizzle and steak. Then, the customer’s appetite sufficiently whetted, he sets the proverbial hook.
“This steak,” he said, “will change your life.”
Photo by Dwain Hebda.
David Bubbus on …
SWEATING THE DETAILS
“Details matter. The restaurant business is a nickel-and-dime business, you know? If you make 7 or 8 percent profit, you’re doing really well. Well, we have 400-and-some employees, and they all get drinks, and we used to have them bring their own cup. That got to be a big mess because everybody had all these fancy cups, and they were everywhere. Junk yard. We started doing everybody get a cup and put your name and the date on it, and keep that same cup. That’s a small thing, right, but a few extra cups would knock a hole in that 7 or 8 percent, so details matter.”
LESS IS MORE
“If you’ve got a decent product that you can put out efficiently, that gives you a lot of advantages. Your inventory’s smaller, and it just makes everything a little simpler to have a small menu. Nowadays, speed’s important, probably as much as anything else. People are in such a hurry, so you’ve got to have something you can get out efficiently.”
STORYTELLING — JUST BECAUSE
“Let me tell you a really neat story. I’d just started in Pine Bluff, and I got a phone call from a guy at the bus station. He called me and said, ‘I’m looking for a job, but I only need to work for a few months. I’m a chef, and I’d love to work for you. I heard you’re a nice guy.’ I went and picked him up at the bus station. Well, this guy told me he was Frank Sinatra’s house chef — little Italian guy, real cocky, probably in his mid-40s. Anyway, he stayed a few months, and I never believed he was Frank Sinatra’s chef, but he was a chef, for sure. He was a genius, and he taught me a whole lot about the food business.
“Anyway, he stayed about three or four months. The story was he was going through a divorce and had to hide out. I don’t know if that’s true — probably hiding out from the law or something — so he called me one day before he left and said he had a gift he wanted to give me. I went to his apartment, and he opened up this picture album. He had all kinds of pictures of him and Frank Sinatra and Billy Martin and Marilyn Monroe, all the stars, and he was standing in the middle with his chef’s hat on, nice car and stuff. I mean, turns out he was the real deal. He gave me a painting that Frank Sinatra gave him supposedly. I’ve still got it on my wall.”
MOTIVATION
“Like I’ve said, it’s more about service than it is the food. You’ve got to build that atmosphere, and you’ve got to pick your people. If they can’t smile, you don’t want them around you. We like to have fun doing what we’re doing, and if someone doesn’t want to have a little fun, they need to go someplace else. We’ve also got regular management training classes for the newer employees and the middle ones and then the store managers, and it’s mostly to keep them excited. You know, nothing happens without excitement, and if you can’t keep people excited, it’s going to go downhill.”
THE SECRET TO SUCCESS IN BUSINESS
“I don’t have any idea. I’ve never worked for anybody to learn anything about being a master in business. I guess I was too cocky to think anybody knew enough to teach me anything. I didn’t have a model, and when you’re 20 years old, 30 years old, I mean, how much can you know? Do the little things right. Do the next right thing. You know, if you see something on the floor, pick it up. Walk with a good step. Have a smile on your face. Get some energy. I guess that’s the only secret we have.
“Honestly, I don’t know how it all happened. It just happened. I guess I didn’t make a long-range plan for any of this. Just take it a day at a time and do the best you can, and see what happens.”
Photos by Dwain Hebda.
