Baby back ribs are everywhere now. Applebee’s has them. Chili’s built an entire advertising campaign around them in the late 90s that people still remember decades later. TGI Fridays, Outback, Famous Dave’s.
At some point in the past 30 years, every casual dining chain in America found a way to put a rack on the menu. But here is the thing about all of those chains and all of those ribs. Somewhere at some point they were trying to be Tony Roma’s. Tony Roma’s invented the category, not barbecue.
Barbecue is ancient. But the idea of a sit-down restaurant chain that made baby back ribs its entire identity, built a national brand around a specific sauce, and turned rib night into a family occasion rather than a backyard affair—that came from a single location in North Miami, Florida in 1972. Tony Roma himself was a food and beverage specialist at the Playboy Club before he opened his restaurant on January 20th, 1972. The original concept was straightforward: steaks, burgers, a neighborhood spot.
Nothing about the opening suggested it would eventually define an entire dining category. The ribs came later, almost by accident. One weekend, Chef David Smith put baby back ribs on the grill and served them with a sauce Roma had developed. The intention was to offer them as a short-term special.
Customers kept ordering them. Then customers started coming back specifically for them. The ribs were not intended to be the restaurant’s identity. They became it anyway.
What made the ribs distinctive had to do with the cut and the preparation. Baby back ribs come from the upper portion of the pig’s rib cage, closer to the spine, which means the meat is leaner and more tender than spare ribs. They cook faster and present more cleanly on a plate. The sauce, which would eventually be called TR’s original, was tangy and sweet, with enough body to caramelize on the rack without burning.
When it went onto the ribs during the final stage of cooking, it reduced down and stuck to the surface. By the early 1970s, this was genuinely different from anything most Americans had encountered in a casual sit-down restaurant. This was not roadside barbecue. It was a refined, reproducible version of something that felt indulgent without being expensive.
The restaurant’s pivot from a Florida neighborhood spot to a national brand happened because of one dinner in January 1976. The Dallas Cowboys were in Miami for Super Bowl 10. Clint Murchison Jr. , who owned the Cowboys, went to Tony Roma’s while the team was in town.
Murchison was a Texas financier who at the height of his wealth had personally owned more than 140 corporations. He was not in the restaurant business, but he became interested very quickly. Murchison bought the majority of Tony Roma’s US franchise rights, and he and Roma established Roma Corporation together, with Murchison owning 80 percent. The first international Tony Roma’s opened in Tokyo in 1979.
Most American restaurant chains in the late 1970s were still figuring out domestic growth. Tony Roma’s was already operating in Japan three years after Murchison acquired his majority stake. By 1983, the chain had 30 locations, concentrated in Florida and California. By the mid-1980s, that number was climbing past 40, then toward 60 and 70.
Franchising drove most of the growth. A franchisee paid an upfront fee, built out the location, hired the staff, and paid ongoing royalties back to the parent company. In theory, it was a way to grow quickly while spreading the risk. In practice, Tony Roma’s would discover over time that the quality of franchisee selection mattered more than almost any other single factor.
The first serious complication had nothing to do with the restaurants themselves. Murchison’s personal finances deteriorated rapidly through the early 1980s. The oil market collapsed, and many of his investments performed poorly. He sold the Dallas Cowboys in 1984 for $60 million, a team he had bought for roughly $600,000 in 1959.
A year later, he filed for personal bankruptcy, described at the time as one of the largest in Texas history. Murchison had already transferred his shares in Roma Corporation to his four children in 1984, but Murchison’s creditors challenged that transfer, arguing the shares had been moved to protect them from legitimate claims. The resulting legal dispute made it very difficult for Roma Corporation to access outside capital for most of the second half of the 1980s. The chain kept operating and kept growing, passing 140 restaurants across 16 states and four continents by 1991, but it did so without the financial flexibility the situation would otherwise have allowed.
The dispute was eventually resolved in 1990 when the family agreed to pay $1. 5 million to settle the creditors’ claims. Murchison himself died in 1987 from a progressive nerve disorder. The man who had turned a North Miami rib restaurant into a global franchise concept never saw what the chain ultimately became.
Through all of this, the food kept working. By the late 1980s, the menu had expanded beyond ribs. St. Louis style spare ribs, with more natural fat marbling, were added.
The sauce options grew: the original stayed, joined by Blue Ridge Smokies and Red Hots. The ribs were slow-cooked to reach that specific texture, firm enough to have some chew, soft enough that the meat pulled cleanly from the bone. Alongside the ribs, the chain added seafood, chicken, and pasta. The onion loaf arrived as an appetizer, Spanish onions breaded and deep-fried into a single solid round.
People who ate at Tony Roma’s in the 1980s tend to remember the onion loaf as clearly as the ribs themselves. The dining room experience had a consistent physical character: dark wood booths, low lighting, a menu printed on heavy card stock. The rib orders came with a lemon-scented wet towel, because there was no way to eat a full rack without needing one. The Romearita, a house margarita shaken tableside, became a signature item in the 1990s.
The chain also won external recognition. Tony Roma’s took the title at a national rib competition in Cleveland, Ohio, judged by an international panel, and won it more than once. Being designated the best ribs in America confirmed what the regular customers had been arguing for 20 years. National Pizza, Inc.
acquired Tony Roma’s in 1993. The company subsequently renamed itself NPC International. NPC was primarily a Pizza Hut franchisee, and buying Tony Roma’s gave it a full-service casual dining brand. Under NPC, the chain continued to expand, and by the end of the 1990s, Tony Roma’s had pushed toward 193 locations at its peak.
But in 1998, NPC made a decision that would define the company’s financial trajectory for the next seven years. The company executed a leveraged recapitalization of RomaCorp, the subsidiary that operated Tony Roma’s, with private equity firm Sentinel Capital Partners. Sentinel acquired 80 percent of RomaCorp for a transaction valued at roughly $19 million. NPC retained a 20 percent stake and received between $110 and $120 million in cash.
To fund it, RomaCorp placed $75 million in high-yield bonds. What a leveraged recapitalization does in practical terms: the business takes on debt to fund the transaction. The cash from that debt goes to the previous owner, and the operating company is left carrying the interest payments. The business did not become larger or more capable as a result.
It became more encumbered. In fiscal 1999, revenue grew 7. 4 percent to about $12 million, but net income fell 60 percent, almost entirely because of the interest expense created by the new debt. This was happening at the same moment that the cost of the core product was trending in the wrong direction.
Baby back ribs represent a small fraction of the total weight of a pig, and as demand for them increased nationally, driven substantially by the popularity of chains like Tony Roma’s itself, prices rose through the late 1990s and into the early 2000s. The competition had also caught up. Chili’s launched its own baby back ribs promotion in the late 1990s with an advertising campaign whose jingle became so embedded in American culture that references still appear across popular media today. Chili’s had more locations, more marketing spending, and a broader menu.
Outback Steakhouse, which opened its first location in 1988 and expanded with extraordinary speed through the 1990s, captured the occasion dining customer that Tony Roma’s had historically served. The problem was not that one competitor replaced Tony Roma’s. Several different competitors each took a portion of what it had built. Chili’s took the rib night customer.
Outback and Longhorn took the celebration meal customer. Applebee’s and Ruby Tuesday took the everyday casual meal customer. In 2003, Tony Roma, the actual man, not the corporation, died at the age of 78. He had been out of the business for nearly 20 years, having sold his interest to the Murchison family in 1984.
In 2005, RomaCorp filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The filing was directly attributable to the debt load taken on in the 1998 recapitalization. Seven years of high interest payments, combined with rising pork costs and a competitive environment that kept tightening, had reduced the company’s ability to service its obligations. Individual restaurants were often still profitable.
The ribs were still good. The onion loaf still came out crispy and hot. But the corporate parent was losing money consistently, and the reason was the debt, not the concept. Bankruptcy reorganization allowed RomaCorp to restructure its debt and continue operating.
But the process cost time, management attention, and credibility with prospective franchisees. During the 2000s, the domestic footprint began contracting. Locations that had been struggling closed and were not replaced. Markets where Tony Roma’s had maintained a strong presence gradually shrank to a handful of locations, then to one or two, then to zero in many cities.
The international business held up better. In countries like Japan, Spain, Germany, and Dubai, Tony Roma’s continued operating through the 2000s and 2010s. In some markets, an American casual dining brand carried a premium association that supported higher price points. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 hit what remained of the domestic business hard.
In July 2021, RomaCorp was sold to Equity Investors of New England. The company had approximately 100 locations globally when the acquisition closed. By 2024, that number had contracted to around 86, with only about 10 still operating in the United States. By 2025, the US count was roughly six.
The chain that invented the casual dining rib category, that built 193 locations across 25 countries, that operated in New York’s Greenwich Village and near the entrance to Universal Studios in Orlando, was down to six American restaurants. How it happened requires holding two things in mind simultaneously. The food itself was never the primary reason for the decline. The business structure built on top of that food was repeatedly compromised by financial decisions, ownership transitions, and commodity exposure that made it extremely difficult to reinvest at the rate the competitive environment required.
A restaurant chain maintains its customer base through consistent quality, maintained locations, visible marketing, and a price-to-value relationship. All of those things require investment, and investment requires margin. The 1998 recapitalization extracted margin from the business. The rising cost of baby back ribs eroded margin from the commodity side.
The competitive environment eroded customer frequency and reduced pricing power. Any one of these pressures addressed in isolation might have been manageable. Together, with debt service creating a constant drain, they were not. In 2023, RomaCorp named Moimina Hake as its CEO, the first female CEO in the company’s history.
Hake came from corporate law rather than restaurant operations. Her approach has been to treat the company less like a legacy chain trying to restore its former scale and more like a startup building on a recognizable brand name. New locations announced for Kimball, Tennessee, and Great Falls, Montana target small markets where a full-service rib-focused restaurant has limited direct competition. Every location open today is franchised.
RomaCorp operates no company-owned restaurants at all. Globally, the chain maintains a presence in more than 20 countries, with particularly strong footholds in Japan, which has had Tony Roma’s locations since 1979, Spain, Germany, and the Middle East. The customers who remember Tony Roma’s tend to remember the onion loaf specifically, that golden dome of fried onion arriving at the table before anything else. They remember the sticky sauce on their hands, the wet towel that followed, the way the meat came off the bone when you did it right.
They remember it as a celebration meal, the kind of place you went when the occasion required something better than a weeknight dinner but the budget required something less than a real event. That is a genuinely valuable position for a restaurant chain to occupy, and Tony Roma’s held it for a long time. The position did not disappear because customers stopped wanting ribs or stopped wanting that kind of occasion. It disappeared because the business built around the position could not sustain itself financially when the costs went up, the competition multiplied, and the ownership decisions reduced the company’s ability to respond.
What is not uncertain is what the chain accomplished between 1972 and the mid-1990s. It took a cut of pork that most sit-down restaurants had not touched, developed a preparation and a sauce that made it reproducible at scale, and built a category out of it. Every casual dining chain that put baby back ribs on the menu in the 1990s and 2000s was in some meaningful sense following the trail that Tony Roma and a chef named David Smith opened one weekend in North Miami more than 50 years ago. The ribs were the right idea.
They still are.
