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Pumpkin porridge anyone? First Watch customers in Tampa Bay are first to try new recipes

 
Shane Schaibly shows off the roast beef and Havarti sandwich and the barn house biscuit sandwich, both of which he developed for First Watch. The company tests new menu items at its Tampa Bay restaurants. If they’re successful here, they’re rolled out nationwide the next year.
Shane Schaibly shows off the roast beef and Havarti sandwich and the barn house biscuit sandwich, both of which he developed for First Watch. The company tests new menu items at its Tampa Bay restaurants. If they’re successful here, they’re rolled out nationwide the next year.
Published Oct. 21, 2016

Pumpkin porridge anyone? First Watch customers in Tampa Bay are first to try new recipes

By Justine Griffin, Tampa Bay Times Staff Writer

Tampa Bay area First Watch fans get special treatment.

First Watch Restaurants, a Bradenton-based chain of breakfast, lunch and brunch restaurants, uses its 11 eateries in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties to test new recipes. That means customers who dine in these restaurants get to try new menu items a year before anyone else.

First Watch is billed as the largest and fastest growing daytime restaurant concept with 180 restaurants across the country, including more than 50 in Florida. Also under its operating umbrella are 100 The Egg & I restaurants, one The Good Egg restaurant in Phoenix and one Bread & Company restaurant in Nashville. The company has won more than 200 "best brunch" and "best breakfast" awards over the years and similar to another Florida-based company, Publix SuperMarkets Inc., First Watch has a loyal base of happy customers.

It's not uncommon for restaurant chains to pick certain markets where they test new items. Tampa-based Bloomin' Brands often unveils menu or decor changes at Outback Steakhouse or Carrabba's Italian Grill locations in St. Petersburg or Clearwater or Tampa first.

"Tampa Bay has always been our test market because of the diversity in the area," said Shane Schaibly, corp orate chef and vice president of culinary strategy for First Watch. "We hit people of almost every age range and income level there."

Schaibly, 34, spoke with the Tampa Bay Times about the restaurant and the Tampa Bay market last week.

"I was born and raised in Dunedin and grew up going to the First Watch in Clearwater near Countryside," he said. "It's cool to be back home and able to cook and do things where my brother and friends and family can try first hand."

Tell me more about how First Watch tests new meals before putting them on the regular menu.

It's my job to come up with five new seasonal dishes every year, and one holiday feature, that we test in Tampa Bay first and then roll out to the rest of the chain's restaurants nationwide the next year. We capture the data and information from the guests who dine in Tampa Bay and use this to make menu decisions. It's always worked well for us in Tampa. I think it's because of how diverse the community is, and with the transient snowbird population, we see customers who are familiar with our brand in other places.

Personally I love the avocado toast at First Watch. How did that go from a test item to a menu staple?

First off, we spend a lot of time traveling to the West Coast to places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Scottsdale, to see what other people in the restaurant industry are doing. We're usually visiting independent restaurants because that's where most trends are born. This is where we get our inspiration to bring back to First Watch. We first started to see avocado toast in San Francisco two to three years ago. It seemed like a natural idea for us to try since we already handle a lot of avocado in our restaurants. But unlike an independent restaurant, we need to figure out if this dish can work at 180 restaurants, not just one.

It's been hugely successful since we launched it on our menu in January 2015. The first time we ran it on the menu people really seemed to like it. Since we launched it as a seasonal item, it came off the menu after 10 weeks, but the customers went crazy. We got a ton of email requests to bring it back and the hashtag #bringbackavocadotoast went viral. So we put it back on the menu in summer 2015 again as a seasonal item. Then we slowly started rolling it out to various markets and by April this year, it was in every market across the U.S. It really started to blow up by the end of last year though. Now you see avocado toast everywhere. It's on the Rachael Ray Show like every other week.

So what are the new items only on the menu for Tampa Bay right now?

Our seasonal items in the restaurants right now are pumpkin pancake breakfast — this is the third or fourth year it's made a comeback. Everyone goes pumpkin crazy, so we run it every fall. But we also have a barn house biscuit breakfast sandwich this season, with pork sausage, Wisconsin sharp cheddar cheese, an over-easy egg, apple butter and a lemon arugula. It's really doing well so far — not avocado toast numbers, but up there for sure. Another one is a pumpkin porridge, which includes brown rice and quinoa, steel cut oatmeal, pumpkin puree and roasted salted pumpkin seeds and dried cranberries on top with a maple cream. This is a great dish, though it doesn't always make sense in Florida given the 80-plus degrees right now, and we take that into consideration. We take those numbers with a grain of salt and reevaluate when it runs nationwide. We also do a seasonal juice item, and this season is a fresh cold carrot and ginger chai.

Contact Justine Griffin at jgriffin@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8467. Follow @SunBizGriffin.

c. 2016 Tampa Bay Times