Many restaurants were caught off-guard when COVID struck in March.

Operators who relied heavily on dine-in traffic were forced to scramble and quickly piece together a sophisticated off-premises program. Third-party delivery partnerships were formed and online ordering platforms were created.

It was an exhausting blur for most of the industry—“most” being the operative word.

Pete Mora experienced an off-premises epiphany years before the pandemic. Mora began with a full-service restaurant in 2002, but he realized that most of the orders came from catering and to-go. So he closed the casual-dining concept and opened Fajita Pete’s in 2008, a quick-service brand focused on speed and convenience with a much smaller footprint.

Since then, roughly 90 percent of business has come outside the four walls; some stores do as much as 97 percent. Mora explains that because Fajita Pete’s didn’t “have to change a million things,” at the beginning of the crisis—including no employee layoffs—the restaurant could focus solely on curbside pickup and adapt it quickly.

Rolling out the new revenue stream in only three days, cashiers transitioned seamlessly to curbside greeters.

“We’ve been a ghost kitchen since 2008,” Mora says. “We just didn’t know it was called a ghost kitchen. We didn’t think there was a cool name for it. It allowed us to keep going. I think the advantage we got was that we were able to remain consistent. Nothing changed. That helped our employees. It helped our franchisees, and it helped the customer know that hey, they weren’t affected.”

Six months into the pandemic, Mora describes the brand’s position as quite strong. Fajita Pete’s is receiving much interest from multi-unit operators, including the second-largest Subway franchisee.

The restaurant started franchising in 2015 and has grown to 16 locations in Texas. Four more are coming before the end of the year. More than 30 are in the pipeline in Texas and Kansas City, which will triple the brand’s footprint.

The plans for growth predate the COVID pandemic. The chain took a year to “go back to basics,” Mora says, improving internal systems to help franchises put more money in the bottom line. The CEO believes COVID elevated interest in Fajita Pete’s because other options were eliminated. Comparing his restaurant to that of a sports bar concept, Mora explains that Fajita Pete’s is a safer bet right now and that an industrious operator could open five or six Fajita Pete’s before opening one sports bar.

“We’re attracting people from huge chains, huge concepts,” Mora says. “People from full dining, full service are making the switch because they see us as a very viable alternative. … It says a lot about the work that the team has put in—the operations team, everybody really throughout the years.”

"… A year and a half ago, if you told me I'm gonna open 10 in Denver, I’d say no way,” he adds. “I can’t do that. But now I have no doubt that we can be successful. We have the distribution in place, the training people in place. We have the marketing. And I think, honestly,  we're attracting sophisticated franchisees, which now it's more talking shop than introducing you to the restaurant, which is also getting us ready for that.”

As to how those future stores may look in a post-COVID world, Mora notes that one of Fajita Pete’s core values is innovation. The company is continually toying with ideas of how the restaurant can implement technology to make operations more efficient. However, Mora says the brand isn’t ready to pull the trigger yet with the next four stores. That’s mainly because the brand already features a simplified menu and a 1,200 to 1,500 square-foot box—two accomplishments that other brands haven’t gravitated toward until recently.