RESTAURANTS BOOMING IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS

Cape Girardeau has seen a restaurant growth explosion in the past five years.

From Applebee's to the Red Lobster under construction, restaurants are popping up throughout the river city.

In 1989, Cape Girardeau had 87 restaurants; today, it has 98, city records show.

"If you look at most cities our size five years ago, we were way under saturated," said Bob Hoppmann, president of the Southeast Missouri chapter of the Missouri Restaurant Association.

"Four years ago, before Applebee's even opened up, Cape Girardeau hardly had any restaurants. They had no major national restaurants of a theme like Applebee's, El Chico, or Red Lobster."

Pasta House opened eight years ago in Cape Girardeau, but it's a regional chain, said Hoppmann, who supervises the Pasta House franchise restaurant here and two others in Carbondale, Ill., and Paducah, Ky.

"The nationals several years ago started looking at these smaller market areas because they had already saturated the larger markets," explained Hoppmann. In addition, he pointed out, restaurants like Applebee's and Garfield's are relatively new to the national restaurant scene.

One of the newest restaurants to open in Cape Girardeau is Fazoli's Italian Restaurant, which features fast foot Italian style. It has a drive-through window so customers can get lunch without leaving their cars.

The local Fazoli's is the newest of 56 Fazoli restaurants since 1988.

"Actually, Cape Girardeau is a little behind Carbondale and Paducah," said Hoppmann. "Cape Girardeau is just catching up."

In the restaurant business, you don't make a lot of money on any one customer; restaurants depend on volume for their success, he said.

Hoppmann said Cape Girardeau can support all this restaurant growth because it is a regional center with medical and retail businesses that attract customers from a wide area.

"So many times we focus on ourselves as a city of 35,000, and we don't realize that within a 40-mile radius, we have 300,000 people," said John Mehner, president of the Cape Girardeau Chamber of Commerce.

Mehner said part of the reason for Cape Girardeau's healthy restaurant business is Southeast Missouri State University. "Obviously, with the university here we have a lot of fast-food eating."

From pizza to Chinese, restaurants offer a lot to choose from in Cape Girardeau. "The pizza places must be doing okay because they generally come in and stay," said Mehner.

He said the restaurant growth reflects the fact we live in an "eating out society."

Hoppmann said, "The American family has been eating out more and more and more every week."

Businessmen eat out a lot, as do single people, he said.

All these restaurants help generate sales tax revenue for the city. In addition, Cape Girardeau's Convention and Visitors Bureau is funded with money from motel and restaurant taxes. The restaurant tax generates about $445,000 a year.

"That's good money for all of us," Mehner said.