GENERAL
As of February 27, 2012, we owned and operated 116 restaurants located in the states of California, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, Nevada, Florida, Ohio, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Indiana, Louisiana and Washington. Our restaurants operate under the BJ’s Restaurant & Brewery®, BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse®, BJ’s Pizza & Grill®, or BJ’s Grill™ names. Our menu features our BJ’s® award-winning, signature deep-dish pizza, our proprietary handcrafted beers and other beers, as well as a wide selection of appetizers, entrees, pastas, sandwiches, specialty salads and desserts, including our Pizookie® dessert. Our BJ’s Restaurant & Brewery® restaurants feature on-premise brewing facilities where BJ’s proprietary handcrafted beers are produced for some of our restaurants. Currently, only three of our restaurants have active brewing operations on-premise. The remainder of our proprietary beer requirements is provided by third-party craft brewers (“contract brewers”) using our proprietary recipes. Our seven BJ’s Pizza & Grill® restaurants reflect the original format of the BJ’s restaurant concept that was first introduced in 1978, one of which has an operating brewery. BJ’s Pizza & Grill® restaurants are a smaller format, full-service restaurant when compared to our larger-format BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse® locations, which currently represent our primary expansion vehicle. In October 2011, we opened our first BJ’s Grill™ location in Anaheim Hills, California. BJ’s Grill™ is a smaller footprint restaurant that is currently intended to serve as a live research and development restaurant, where certain food, beverage, facility, technological and operational enhancements will be tested for potential application to our larger restaurants. We have no current intention to open additional BJ’s Grill™ locations during fiscal 2012; however, we may consider opening such locations in the future.
The first BJ’s restaurant was opened in 1978 in Orange County, California and was centered on bringing the unique flavor of deep-dish pizza to southern California. We acquired the BJ’s restaurant concept in 1995 from its original founders. Our initial public offering of common stock occurred in 1996. Over the years we expanded the BJ’s concept from its beginnings as a small pizzeria to a full service, high energy casual dining restaurant with over 125 menu items, including appetizers, specialty salads, soups, pastas, sandwiches, entrees and desserts. In 1996, we introduced our proprietary handcrafted beers when we opened our first BJ’s Restaurant & Brewery® in Brea, California. Beginning in 2002, with the opening of our first restaurants in the state of Texas, we began using qualified third-party contract brewers to supply us with our proprietary beer due to certain liquor license restriction in that state. Our differentiated, high-quality, handcrafted beers have added a unique dimension to the BJ’s concept which further distinguishes BJ’s from many other restaurant concepts, and complements our
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