A delightful American-style restaurant not ten minutes from Jesuit, Renny’s serves great food with culture. It also doesn’t hurt that it has connections to Jesuit, with the owner having sons who graduated from our great school, one of whom works at the restaurant. With a menu that ranges from burgers to mussels, it is sure to find a meal for any food you want.Â
Interview with Mark Maguire (Owner) and Rowen Maguire (Son)
Mark Â
Interviewer: “Why were you inspired to get into the restaurant industry?”
Mark: “Well, actually, it was kind of by default. When I was in college, I was working at a nightclub, and after I had been working for them for a couple of years, the manager there sat me down to talk to me about possibly coming to work for them in a management position. They were getting ready to open up many clubs across the country, and I thought it sounded like a pretty good deal; they were offering to pay me more than the banks that I was potentially going to work at. I wasn’t going to have to wear a suit and tie every day, so I thought that sounded good, and that’s what I ended up doing. I jumped on with them as a manager. I traveled around the country for a few years.
I ended up in Indianapolis, where I met a bunch of guys who came into my club one night who were up at Indiana University [and] Purdue University recruiting at their hotel restaurant management hospitality program. I found out they worked for Disney and chatted them up for a few days while they were in town. A couple of weeks later, I got a call from a a buddy of mine who just went to work for Disney and told me how to talk to them, so called the recruiter, and the next thing I knew, I was living in Florida and working for Mickey Mouse.”
Interviewer: “How has it been running a restaurant in Dallas specifically? Is there anything unique about it here or any unique challenges and opportunities?”
Mark: “I don’t know that I would call it unique. I think Dallas is a great restaurant town; they have a very dense demographic of folks who eat out pretty regularly. We have guests that come into our restaurant three or four times a week, sometimes five times a week, so that makes Dallas a little bit different. Dallas has always been the place for new concepts to cut their teeth. A lot of the national chains started here in Dallas, and I think it’s pretty well-known around the country that if you have a startup that is successful in Dallas, you’re proving yourself to have a really good chance of being successful no matter where you go.”
Rowen
Interviewer: “How has it been working together as a family?”
Rowen: “I think it’s been pretty great. I’ve only had two other jobs where I haven’t been working with my dad, and I could say it’s better than those two. It’s a little bit of both being proud of working for the restaurant that my family owns, and it is a little bit nervous having to look over at my dad while he’s watching me. I think it’s a good way to make connections with the customers and guests as well and have a more personal side of things than just a chain restaurant.”
Interviewer: “Is there anything you learned at Jesuit, whether in the classroom or just the values that are taught at the school, that you try to apply in your daily life?”
Rowen: “Yeah, for sure. I think the service side of Jesuit is something I use the most. It’s pretty much all the morals of Jesuit I’ve used throughout my day-to-day life, and the majority of them, if not all, I’ve used in my work life. I think the ability to connect with people is the biggest one. They taught us great manners and gave us a very personable attitude. I think mainly the service side of Jesuit helped with my job; it gave me a new outlook on people and how to connect with them.”
Mark
Interviewer: “How did you design the menu?”
Mark: “Wow, okay, so you know the menu was a very, very thoughtful process. You know, back when I first started, I decided that I was going to open my place back in 1999. I noticed that there was a it was, you know, kind of you had your fast-casual restaurants like Chili’s and Fridays. Those kinds of sit down at Longhorn Steakhouse, that kind of thing, and then there was this big gap, the next level up being restaurants like Al Biernat’s or the Mercury or Abacus or some of the chef-driven restaurants, and so you know, my brain was going, ‘okay well you know I can go in the Chilies or Houston’s or Hillstone,’ and this was way back then.
I spend 20 or 25 dollars a person for a meal, and then if I want to go up [to a nicer restaurant] I have to go to a Mercury or an Abacus or an Al Bernat’s Steakhouse, and those are $50 back then, and so I’d recognize this big gap in that in the dining segment where I felt like I could provide an experience that was on the same level as a merc career or Abacus and maybe cut back a little bit on some of the accouterments that accompany it, with the plating and the multiple sauces and the foie gras, and you know, the more costly garnish type items and present a plate that was of similar quality and charge 20 or 30 percent less.
And so that’s where we started, we started designing a menu based off of, you know, kind of the best in class which I always felt was Houston’s [and] Hillstone at that level, and then modeling after places like the Mercury and Abacus and those places and try to design a menu that pulled a little bit from both and allowed us to provide an experience at a much higher level with very high-quality food items at a much more reasonable price.”
Interviewer: “So, kind of touching on that, you started kind of thinking about your first place in 1999. How has the restaurant industry evolved and changed since that point? That might be too long a question to answer.”
Mark: “Obviously, the restaurant industry is social, and you know, the biggest changes I think we’ve seen are kind of in the independent sector, you know, back in the early to mid-90s, there were almost no independent restaurants to speak of and almost everything you saw, everywhere you went, every sit-down restaurant, was some kind of a chain. We’ve seen the evolution of the independent restaurants in almost every genre of the industry, from fast food drive-thru’s, to counter-service fast casuals, to casual dining, and fine dining, all of those segments have been populated over the course of the last 15 years with a lot of new independent concepts, that’s probably the biggest change that I’ve seen just industry-wide for sure.”
Interviewer: “I’m gonna finish it off with just a nice simple question: when you sit down to Eat at Renny’s, what is your go-to order?”
Mark: “That’s hard. That’s like choosing your favorite child. You know, it just really depends on what mood I’m in. I’ve probably recently gravitated towards the pork chop with the mashed potatoes or south of spring corn and mustard seed gravy. The one thing that I ordered the most was the burger. I still maintain that we have one of the best burgers in the city of Dallas, so that’s always a go-to to me, and then the fish and shrimp tacos here are a regular on the menu.”
Rowen: “I think I would say if I have the time, I’ll show up every morning on Tuesday to get that Arizona salad, our lunch special on Tuesdays, and that’s my favorite salad on the dinner menu. I’m either going to have to go with the “Hot Lopez”. I had that a disgusting amount of days in a row, and I think that’s the best spicy fried chicken sandwich I’ve ever had. That and probably the ginger salmon. I think our shrimp and crab fried rice is one of the best-fried rices I’ve ever had, but there’s a ginger-glazed salmon on top, so that’s a good one.”
So there you have it, Roundup readers. The lasagna with green chilis is also worth a try (it is this writer’s go-to order). Whenever you have the time, look in Preston Forest for Renny’s, located at 11661 Preston Rd #153, for a great dining experience.
Tune into The Roundup for more food reviews!
