Sizzler is back on the brink with a shiny new product and ambitions to match

Sizzler is a bit of a mystery. Despite shrinking to a fraction of its former size and receding mainly on the West Coast, it’s a symbol that remains a cultural touchstone—in movies and on the Internet, South Park again Saturday Night Live. And even if you haven’t eaten once, you maybe know what it is.

This made it a dream client for Mike Perry, founder and chief creative officer of Tavern, who is working with the beloved yet beleaguered chain on a complete brand refresh from its website to its stores.

“This kind of works in a weird way backwards – it’s there in the mind, but not in the world or in the hand,” Perry said. “It’s great to take a brand that has been beaten for decades and bring it back. It’s not fun to take the shiny one and push it a little further.”

Digging into Sizzler’s past

When it launched in 1958 in Culver City, California, Sizzler helped pioneer the casual dining scene. There have been ups and downs over the years, but for a restaurant known as much for its endless salad bar (which makes up 40% of its business) as its affordable steaks, the global pandemic hasn’t been a big improvement. The chain filed for bankruptcy in September 2020, and has been on a roll ever since. Today there are 75 locations (down from 270 at Sizzler’s peak). Christopher Perkins—formerly of Anheuser-Busch InBev—joined in 2019, and is now president and CEO.

Perkins says the brand was lost, and he knew it needed more than just a new coat of paint. He wanted Sizzler to be a brand not locked in the past, but one of the landmarks of the Southern California region, like In-N-Out Burger, or Wawa on the East Coast. In addition to losing the way, Perkins discovered that the Sizzler had also lost its history, literally—there was no solid archive of goods and other items. So he started doing some archeology into the company’s past, at one point sending a marketing employee on a trip to a warehouse to see what could be dug up.

Before launching Tavern, Perry had worked on the Budweiser account at Jones Knowles Ritchie, which is where he met Perkins. When Tavern got into the business, Perry and Perkins focused on all aspects of Sizzler—from the retail movement to the business side—and did a bit of digging, buying everything they could find on eBay. .

Ultimately, Tavern saw the solution to Perkins’ problem as a “modern heritage” approach.

“The quest for timelessness,” said Perry. “It’s a real tension between modernity and heritage and finding that it takes the old and ultimately makes it new—and makes it new so it can continue to work in the future. . . . If you’re always trying to balance that, that’s when good things start to happen.”

A collection of letters

The archival find was a Hanna-Barbera-esque rendered rib-eye steak, which they called the Ribby Ribeye.

“All good brands have character,” Perry said. “[Ribby Ribeye] it’s the very thing that unites the iconic Southern California brand from mid-century to today, and it seemed like a no-brainer to bring it back.”

The bar features a cast of characters representing some of the brand’s best-known offerings—cheese bread, unlimited shrimp, lobster tail, and Perry’s favorite, the Salad Barbarian, an amorphous blob on a plate that represents all of the store’s offerings. dear bar.

With product fonts, Tavern also turned to the past. Perry says Sizzler used Windsor and Caslon Black Swash cuts from its inception until the mid-’80s or so, and they felt very Southern Californian in design and aesthetics, so his team used Windsor EF-Extra, Emfatick NF (taking Caslon Black Swash), and Block Berthold Heavy and Condensed. For a modern feel, all features are combined with modern messages and images.

The Tavern was given the right not to mess with the logo, so only the team slowly combined with the logo. They cleaned it up, took down the black background and dialed it back to one color, refined the type in small ways, and flattened it. They also tilted it at an angle to further enhance the visual aspect of the cattle product.

Sizzler Light

Of course, all of these beauty updates reflect major—and perhaps more consequential—changes. The tavern also worked on the restaurants, the uniforms, the living “product” of how the employees talk and put together the restaurant (think Chick-fil-A and all those “my pleasures”), the plates, and more.

It’s safe to say that if you walked into any competition in the category—Outback, Chili’s, Applebee’s, etc.—if there wasn’t a logo, you wouldn’t have a clue where you were. They all tend to look very similar: dark space, menus with food painted on a black background, which Perry says doesn’t really convey freshness or flavor. So the team sought to differentiate Sizzler from the rest of the pack by evoking the brand’s red color, which aims to stand out and the overall friendly vibe. The new website is now live, and Perkins says the changes will be to the physical restaurants in phases.

In many ways, the redesign is an attempt to remind the world that Sizzler is is something an anomaly. It sits somewhere between a chain restaurant and a steak house, not to mention the past and present. As for the future, the team says the key to all that nostalgia can feel dated is to maintain an ongoing understanding of what’s culturally important today—then look at the brand’s heritage and see what resonates with it.

As always, time will tell. Meanwhile, Perry says, “[After working] for big brands, we get bored of the product much faster than the consumer. And just frankly [with Sizzler] I’m not—and that’s what I think successful reform is. “