Tom Jednorowicz Illustration by Barry Blitt
Tom Jednorowicz is not a muscle-bound, roided-out, knuckle-dragging lummox.
He is not slow witted (he boasts an engineering degree), and he doesn’t fit armchair curmudgeon Archie Bunker’s definition on “All in the Family” of someone “dead from the neck up.”
Despite all that, he is a Meathead.
Jednorowicz’s definitions for the term, which cover three different walls of his fast food chain of restaurants, are markedly different. “An all-natural burger,” begins the first, “made to order right here in our kitchen from 100% Certified Angus Beef, without fillers, additives or scraps.” Definitions also describe his customers and employees: “A dedicated, hard-working individual who is driven to excellence and strives to be better at everything they do.” The website says they’re hiring “ambitious meatheads.”
Unlike the Happy Meal, this is not doublespeak. This is an all-natural, inviting alternative to the burger chains that have made us all slaves (myself included) to poor quality, fast food restaurants.
Jednorowicz sits across from me at his Northbrook location, inside the Willow Festival Shopping Center. Between us lies a smorgasbord of Meatheads burgers and fries, chicken tenders and hotdogs. Out of the veritable cornucopia before us, Jednorowicz’ chief concern is with the feta fries, which are a limited-time menu item this summer.
Customer feedback was in: the feta fries were a little soggy. (This, due to the fact that they coat them with a lemon olive oil, for starters.) But also because “our fries were potatoes this morning,” explains Jednorowicz. “The hard thing about fresh-cut fries is, with no preservatives, they have a very limited shelf life.” He thinks for a moment, before adding, “that’s what we’re about: clean food.”
The good-looking 48-year-old restaurateur — with a salt and pepper goatee and a slicked back mane of hair — isn’t exactly the first person you’d expect to own a chain of 16 high-end fast-casual restaurants in Illinois: he looks halfway between corporate executive and Silicon Valley techie. He looks like he owns a motorcycle. (He does.) He also meditates, does yoga, and takes mixed martial arts lessons with a world champion fighter.
But above all, he’s passionate about crafting an enjoyable experience for the whole family —similar to what Friendly’s used to be long ago — at each restaurant. To that end, he has personally delivered gratis takeout to make up for bad Yelp reviews. He takes customer feedback seriously, and he acts on it.
Meatheads first started with its Bloomington location in 2007.
“I was probably about five years late on that,” admits Jednorowicz about starting his own business. “I was staring 40 in the eye at the time.” He had young kids at home. But years of being in the industry gave him an idea for a product he believed in.
Jednorowicz first came to Chicago to work for Burger King out of graduate school at the University of Connecticut. After getting a taste of the real estate side of the business, he left, getting a job six months later with Boston Chicken. It was the mid-1990s, and they were looking to expand outside of New England.
At the time, Boston Chicken was the darling of Wall Street.
“It was just explosive growth,” says Jednorowicz. “It skyrocketed and then plummeted just as fast.”
From there, Boston Chicken — what would eventually become Boston Market — spawned Einstein/Noah Bagels, and Jednorowicz was once again along for the ride and the lightning-fast expansion. This time, however, he was in the saddle: adding 400 more bagel stores in three years.
But aggressive expansion comes with a price. Restaurants tend to lose their souls in the process. They forgo the special sauce that makes them different.
He cites Potbelly as an example. In his stint as chief development officer, Jednorowicz made sure “every restaurant was unique.” They called it artifacting.
“If it took eight weeks to build a Potbelly, on the seventh week it would look no different. But on the eighth week, a specialized team would come in to source out local artifacts or antiques from the area,” he says. “They’d customize the restaurant to the neighborhood.”
Jednorowicz thinks they’ve drifted away from that.
He’s trying to be more methodical with Meatheads. He engages with the community in the form of Meathead of the Game awards, Burger Battles, and the Voracious Meatheads reading programs. Only a handful of the restaurants have drive-thrus, because they don’t fit well with his business plan: butts in chairs. The construction will be finished on the next Meatheads in Lake Bluff this fall — No. 17 in eight years.
Compared to the breakneck pace of the past, this seems snail-like. But Jednorowicz wants Meatheads to grow like the family-owned, highly celebrated In-N-Out Burger chain on the West Coast — without losing its soul.
And what of the name? It brings to mind Five Guys and Smashburger-hungry men in the 18-30-year-old demographic.
“That’s exactly who we don’t get,” says Jednorowicz. Instead, half their customers are women with young kids. So they softened the earlier logo from an uppercase snarl to a palatable lowercase design.
But something that’s stayed the same?
“Clean, simple, well-prepared, straightforward food,” says Jednorowicz. “That’s what we are. We’re not trying to be anything else.”