From busboy to selling 22 Applebee’s restaurants during a pandemic

Jim Stevens’ restaurant career probably was preordained in 1951 when his father bought a drive-in near Central and Hillside called the Kau Kau Korner.

“Supposedly it’s Hawaiian,” Stevens said. “It meant ‘good food.’ I don’t speak Hawaiian, but I never questioned him.”

Hugh Stevens told his son, who was in fifth grade at the time, he could be a busboy for 25 cents an hour.

“I thought, man, what a deal,” Jim Stevens said.

Fast forward more than half a century, and Stevens has now sold his chain of 22 Applebee’s restaurants — no small feat during a pandemic when sit-down restaurants are struggling. (Look for details on the deal and the new owner within about a week.)

“I thought I had them sold about” two or three years ago, Stevens said.

The buyer got into another business instead and went bankrupt.

“So it was probably a good thing that he didn’t buy them from me.”

Stevens was one of the early Applebee’s franchisees. One restaurant deal seemed to lead to another for him just as it did for his father.

In the late 1950s, by which time Stevens had graduated to soda jerk and then cook, he remembers a salesman coming to see his father.

“This guy who worked for Colonel Sanders came down to Wichita. He was telling my dad, ‘I’ve got this unique way of cooking chicken in a pressure cooker.’ ”

Hugh Stevens and his brother-in-law and partner, Chuck Schoenhofer, gave it a shot.

“My dad and uncle, they really liked it,” Stevens said.

They decided to expand with more restaurants and kept their name added to the chicken name: Kau Kau Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The Kau Kau name was better known in Wichita, and Stevens said, “My dad was not sure if Kentucky Fried Chicken was going to make it or not.”

Stevens went to work for his father full time after college. Eventually, he and his cousin, Tom Ryan, started a chain: Yankee Clipper Fish and Chips.

The business had its ups and downs, but eventually the two franchised it.

“It was my first run at franchising,” Stevens said. “We were just a couple of young kids at the time. We didn’t know any better.”

A cheesy next step

Eventually, he decided to put a new concept at one of his fish restaurants: Big Cheese Pizza.

“It just took off,” Stevens said.

The business grew to more than 100 sites, and Stevens branched into other restaurants.

“I’ve been in a lot of different deals.”

He was checking on a restaurant he owned in Kansas City, the Peep on Metcalf, in about 1986 when he noticed another new restaurant going in around the corner from his. He popped over to see what was going on and met a couple of guys named Abe Gustin and John Hamra — franchisees of the Applebee’s concept that they eventually owned and began franchising to others.

“So I got talking to them quite a bit,” Stevens said.

“This is an interesting menu,” he told them. “I think this would do well in Wichita.”

Gustin told Stevens he had to get the restaurant opened first and then would come to Wichita to visit him.

Stevens got the franchise rights for Wichita, western Kansas, Omaha and Council Bluffs, Iowa.

“So, anyway, 31 years later and 22 stores later, I finally sold,” said Stevens, 78. “I’m getting up in years.”

That doesn’t mean he’s retiring, though. He is still a partner in three Freddy’s Frozen Custard & Steakburgers restaurants in Columbia, S.C., and plans to put in about seven or eight more.

Stevens said he got into the Freddy’s business “a lot later than I should have,” and the Columbia market was about all that was left. He said sales were doing all right before the pandemic, but now they have taken off due to the newly popular drive-through. Diners are more comfortable getting food to go, and it’s introduced a lot of people to Freddy’s in a big way.

“We’re really doing much better than we did a couple of years ago.”

Stevens had already achieved restaurant success before his father died, and he knew he was proud of him.

He’s not sure he’ll ever completely retire, but Stevens said he knows he has to stay active.

“I might just go fishing. I don’t know. . . . I gotta have something to keep me out of trouble.”