D’Angelo’s restaurants are certainly not dreary. The interiors feature maple wood and bright green accent colors. But the original logo has a whimsical quality that would look more at home on a hot dog stand, and customers complained the wooden booths weren’t very comfortable.

Last February, the company opened a restaurant with a new sleek and simple logo worked into a brick wall. The menuboard is on a wall rather then behind the counter. Booth seats feature padding, bright lighting has been replaced with softer track lighting, and some “kitchen theater” has been added in the form of salads mixed in front of customers. The kitchen has been opened up because the company wants customers to see that its popular steak sandwiches are made to order. D’Angelo even changed the background music, going from generic elevator music to a classic rock mix custom designed by Muzak.

“It is much more cozy,’’ McManama says. Nineteen additional restaurants have undergone a similar redesign.

The proof has been in the profit. Sales increased 20 percent at the first redesigned store, and guest checks are up 5 percent, while menu prices stayed the same. But D’Angelo isn’t ready to roll out the concept to franchise holders. It’s experimenting with slightly less expensive versions of the redesign to see if they boost sales a similar amount.

The key for the company now is figuring out which elements of the redesign are most critical to drawing customers to eat-in and to work out the advertising kinks. The first redesign looked so different that customers thought it was a different restaurant, so the company is experimenting with ads that feature both the old and new logos.

In post-redesign surveys, customers say the logo, brick wall, exterior signage improvements, and comfy booths are important to the eat-in experience. The fancier flooring and ceiling options might become optional. New franchised stores being built in Albany, New York, and Orlando will have the redesigned look, but the company won’t offer the package to existing franchises until sometime next year.

The kind of methodical planning and execution in which D’Angelo is involved is critical to avoiding mistakes. One of the best examples of a redesign-upgrade gone bad comes from the 1990s, when the Sizzler restaurant chain got bitten by the buffet bug. The buffets became so big they took away table space, and the restaurant’s reputation for a quality steak at a reasonable price suffered as cheaper product was substituted on the buffet line and the company’s core customers disappeared.

“You have to stay in sync with the consumer,’’ Lombardi says. So it’s OK for McDonald’s to offer a better grade of coffee to entice Mom to buy some when she brings the children for lunch, but dumping the value meals and focusing exclusively on higher-end food would be a kiss of death.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from Sizzler is Golden Corral, a good example of a company that re-invented itself. It moved several years ago to emphasize food freshness in its buffet with an open kitchen design. The brand moved to a larger format store to handle the re-designed buffet and kept its appeal to the value-oriented customer, while attracting customers that would normally associate a buffet with a blah dining experience.

But the truth is, you don’t have to upscale to increase sales. In fact, one of the ironies of upscaling is that it runs counter to what the emerging international trends are in restaurant eating. While it might make sense for a company that never wants to leave the United States to put fancier greens in the salads and halogen lighting in its stores, any company with international ambitions would want to focus on value.

Even in the United States, “the vast majority of people are concerned about value. You see that Wal-Mart has targeted that,’’ Peterson says. “Globally, only 2 percent of the population makes more then $35,000. There’s really opportunity in that middle-of-the-scale $5,000–$35,000 group.’’ end