I went to Tulane University in New Orleans, and prior to that my family opened a restaurant here in Columbus, Ohio, called Lindey’s. It’s an Upper East Side, New York–style café-bistro that has now become an institution in Columbus. It opened in 1981, and that was the year I started college, so my career was launched with the family business. When I went to business school in New Orleans, I learned to cook at Mr. B’s Bistro down in the French Quarter—that’s how I got started.

I graduated in 1985, and we started Bravo Brio Restaurant Group in the early ’90s. My brother and I built that company to about 60 restaurants and then sold it in 2006. After that transaction, I began the process of studying fast casual. Fast casual was coming on at that time, and nobody was really doing anything in the Italian segment, so we began the development of Piada in early 2009 and launched the first store in early 2010.