Question : Based on what you know, prepare an income statement for Eat Here.

The Bistro's "relentless pursuit of excellence in food and service" earned regional acclaim from the Sarasota Herald, the Tampa Tribune, and the St. Petersburg Times. It was awarded its first Florida Trend Magazine's Golden Spoon in the early 1990s as one of the Top 20 Restaurants in Florida. Throughout the 1990s, the restaurant earned national recognition and was consistently awarded the highest Zagat ratings in the region.

In September of 2005, Beach Bistro was invited to perform a James Beard Foundation dinner at the Beard House in New York, "the Temple" of American Culinary Art. In 2006, the Bistro expanded the Bar and introduced a casual bar menu featuring The World's Best Grouper Sandwich and the acclaimed Steak Sandwich. That same year, it also began offering a few outdoor tables for dining (when the weather is right, the Gulf views are spectacular).

In 2010, Sean and Susan introduced another Anna Maria Island restaurantEat Here, a Gulf Coast cookery serving an upscalecasual menu and craft beer from select microbrewers. In 2011, the Beach Bistro was once again awarded the top Zagat rating in food and service on the Gulf Coast of Florida. In November of that year, a second Eat Here location was opened in Sarasota, receiving rave reviews from the beginning.

The Beach Bistro is currently an eighttime recipient of Florida Trend Magazine's Golden Spoon Award and has been enthroned in the Golden Spoon "Hall of Fame." Its wine list regularly receives the Wine Spectator Award of Excellence for offering "one of the best wine lists in the world." It is included in Zagat's Top Restaurants in America and is lauded by the guide for "the best food on the Gulf Coast ... as good as any in New York or Paris." Sean's ambition has been the same since the Beach Bistro first opened: "to provide you with one of the best dining experiences that you have ever had."

Eat Here

Eat Here (what a great name for a restaurant) personifies the character of its creator. Eat here, Murphy says, offers smaller plates than Beach Bistro and does it in a more relaxed atmosphere. The menus, for example, are printed on regular paper, stapled together, and given to customers on clipboards. The napkins are cotton kitchen towels. Eat Here has 70 seats downstairs, 40 on the patio, and 50 upstairs, which also includes a cool patio.

Eat Here has a food cost percentage of 28 percent, Labor 33 percent, alcohol 8 percent, beer 3 percent, and wine 14 percent. Sean gets all this for a 4 percent of sales lease. (The industry average is 8 percent.) The cost of opening was $300,000 downstairs and $200,000 upstairs.

Sean says, "It has a cool and hip feel, but it's still casual and welcoming."

Finally, the Eat Here model depends on a quick and easy opening. The Holmes Beach location was builtout in a month and cost about $250,000ultrafast and inexpensive in the restaurant industry. Murphy brought on two passive partners for Eat Here. One, parttime Longboat Key resident Skip Sack, once owned multiple Applebee's and is a past president of the National Restaurant Association. Sack helps Murphy look for new locations.

"I think it's a great concept because it's a niche no one else is doing," Sack says. "It's not like a chain."

The Eat Here idea, Murphy says, goes back five or six years, when he saw guests shift their attitudes about dinner out. "I began to notice dining out was becoming much more about being entertained," he says. He noticed the trend at the Beach Bistro. Although the shift to new diningout attitudes is a big reason behind Eat Here, the number one lesson he teaches budding restaurant owners is that food comes first. "It's always about the food," Murphy says. "You have to get an 'A' every time." Eat Here's signature dishes are seafood stew, pot roast, lobster taco, and heart attack hot dog.

A third location was eyed at university town center close to Lakewood Ranch, a large upscale master planned community in Manatee County, but Sean got wind of the fact that Chris Sullivan, a founder of the Outback chain, was about to open his latest concept, Carmel.