Wichita-born restaurant concept just keeps growing, now has 12 restaurants in four states
In December of 2022, Alex Harb opened his first Meddys restaurant outside of Wichita, choosing a property in the Kansas City suburb Prairie Village.
The quick-service Mediterranean restaurant was a hit, so he decided to add more in the Kansas City area.
Now — less than two and a half years after first taking Meddys out of town — Harb has 12 restaurants operating in four states. Within the next 12 months, he said, the total will expand to 25 sites in seven states.
In about a year, he said, he hopes to start franchising the concept.
“What we’re trying to do is prove to ourselves that the concept works in these different markets before we start franchising,” Harb said.
Meddy’s, along with Thrive Restaurant Group’s HomeGrown, has been one of Wichita’s fastest-growing locally invented concepts since Ribbit Computers. HomeGrown, which has followed a trajectory similar to Meddys, now has 14 restaurants in five states. The two chains have been targeting the same markets, and in one case — in Kansas City, Missouri’s Brookside neighborhood — they opened just a few blocks apart.
Harb, who started his entrepreneurial career when he opened his first Ribbit Computers in 2004, decided to get into the restaurant business in 2014. He took over a space at 7906 E. Harry that Jimmy’s Egg had vacated and opened the first Meddys, a fast-casual restaurant that served shawarma, hummus and falafel.
The first Meddy’s didn’t take off right away, Harb said. He naively believed he could open the restaurant and that it would run itself. When that didn’t work, he knew he needed to make a change.
“I had to roll up my sleeves and go in the kitchen and figure it out,” said Harb, who grew up in Beirut and graduated from Wichita State University in 2004 with a computer science degree.
Two years later, Harb opened his second Meddys at 21st and Greenwich followed by 120 S. Washington in 2018; 560 S. Ridge in 2020; and NewMarket Square in 2021. He’d always hoped he could grow the restaurant into a concept he could expand outside of Wichita, and once he decided he’d properly saturated the local market, he began to look at nearby cities.
“We’ve always had that intention to expand, and the more we expanded, the more we started getting traction, so we kept doing it more and more,” Harb said. “I always say that we will open locations as soon as we find a great site and great managers to run them. Those are the two litmus tests.”
The most recent Meddys additions have been in Lenexa, which opened on July 17; Liberty, Missouri, which opened on Aug. 20; Tulsa, which opened on Nov. 10; Oklahoma City, which opened on Dec. 15; and Omaha, which opened on March 16.
Several more Meddys are about to open or are in the planning stages. Harb will add a restaurant in Salina in early July and in Moore, Oklahoma, in early August. He also is working on securing a second site in Tulsa plus sites in the Kansas City suburbs of Olathe and Lee’s Summit; in Omaha and in Lincoln, Nebraska; and in northwest Arkansas.
After that, he’s looking at opening restaurants in Yukon and Norman, Oklahoma, and he’s also making plans for his first Wisconsin location.
Outside of Wichita, Harb said, Meddys has gotten the most enthusiastic response in Oklahoma. The new Oklahoma City restaurant frequently has a long line of people waiting to place their orders and has set sales records for the chain.
As Meddys has grown, Harb has altered its look and approach a few times. He debuted a new, more sleek look when he opened the downtown Meddys, where he also added a cocktail bar. He liked the approach so much that he briefly closed the Meddy’s restaurants at 21st and Greenwich and at Harry and Rock to replicate the look. He also added bars to all his restaurants.
His Meddys outside of Wichita have been opening with an even more modern look, and he’s now retrofitting his existing restaurants to match that style. He just finished upgrading the downtown Meddys, which now has a big indoor tree as a centerpiece, modern tiles, and updated tables, chairs and booths. The restaurants in NewMarket Square and at 21st and Greenwich will be updated in the coming months, he said.
After COVID, Harb also slimmed down the Meddys menu, which now focuses more on shawarma sandwiches, Mediterranean bowls and salads. The best sellers outside of Wichita, he said, have been the garlic chicken and the salmon.
Harb said he’s been “pleasantly surprised” by the restaurant’s rapid growth, though he’s also mindful of not growing too quickly.
His success, he said, has come from giving customers what they’ve asked for.
“Our first location didn’t get much traction for the first couple of years, so I had to go back and pivot and make changes by listening to the guests and making changes based on what they wanted,” he said, “not based on what I thought they wanted.”
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