Former Hooters owner bringing chain’s rival restaurant Twin Peaks to Myrtle Beach
Former Hooters of America owner Coby Brooks is opening a Twin Peaks restaurant in the Myrtle Beach area, and he has selected a peculiar location.
Brooks will open a Twin Peaks through his company La Cima Restaurants LLC at the Myrtle Beach Mall in the Briarcliffe Acres area of Myrtle Beach, barely a hundred yards from a Hooters location where he once worked.
He is awaiting a building permit from Horry County to begin construction and hopes to open in September, as early as Labor Day weekend.
The restaurant is taking over a space previously occupied by the Islamorada Fish Company restaurant, which closed in January 2017 after 13 years in operation.
“I have a lot of history here,” said Brooks, who lives in Atlanta but has a lot of relatives in the Loris area. “We always wanted to come back to Myrtle Beach when we got involved with Twin Peaks. It’s a great market. I’m more excited about this store probably than any of the previous ones we built, for a lot of different reasons.”
The Hooters and Twin Peaks restaurant chains have similar business models, with all-female waitstaffs. Twin Peaks waitresses are referred to as lumberjills, as they wear blue jean shorts and tight tank tops tied above the midriff.
Though he has had a prior dispute with Hooters, Brooks said the new restaurant being near a long-established Hooters location in front of the mall, where he had his first Hooters job as a dishwasher one summer between college semesters, is mere coincidence.
“It’s odd. We didn’t plan it that way obviously,” he said. “The opportunity came up and the deal was a good deal.”
Brooks, who separated from the Hooters chain in July 2011, had a local site chosen in 2012 for one of his first Twin Peaks locations — the former Seafare restaurant on the waterway on restaurant row — and was about to sign a lease when the closed restaurant burned down.
“This was going to be our third or fourth store we were going to build,” Brooks said. “When it burned that went away so we didn’t get to build it, so we had other things in the hopper and we started working on that.
“. . . We figured at some point the right spot would land in our lap and it did.”
What is Twin Peaks?
Twin Peaks is a sports bar and restaurant with a mountain lodge theme — hence animal heads and antlers as decorations throughout the restaurants.
Brooks has exclusive rights to Twin Peaks franchises in the Carolinas, Alabama, Georgia, eastern Tennessee and central and northern Florida, and this will be his 15th in operation.
His first location was in the Buckhead area of Atlanta in July 2012 and the second was Greenville. He closed two underperforming locations in 2020 during the struggles of the coronavirus pandemic.
Twin Peaks has an extensive menu with many of the items made from scratch. Though it has a Tex-Mex profile several other kinds of food are available. It has 15 various appetizers; wings with many options; soups and salads; burgers; sandwiches; tacos; entrees including chicken, ribs, steak, fish, shrimp and a pot roast; several sides; and a few desserts.
The restaurant has 32 taps serving beer at 29 degrees.
The Myrtle Beach restaurant will be more than 11,000 square feet and seat approximately 350 customers, and it can accommodate large groups with several large tables to seat groups of 12 to 18.
It will be the first of Brooks’ Twin Peaks with a middle circular bar that seats 34 and TopGolf swing suite with a simulator and high-top table that can be reserved and rented hourly.
“It’s going to be the most unique one we’ve ever built,” Brooks said.
There will be more than 70 televisions with minimum 75-inch screens. The building will have an outdoor patio, an enclosed lounge area that can be open air, and an outdoor fire pit with cigars available in an Adirondack humidor.
“We won’t be the only place to watch sports but we will definitely be the best place to watch sports, I can guarantee you that,” Brooks said. “There won’t be anything like it.”
Building a second empire
Brooks is the son of late Loris native Bob Brooks, who built the Hooters empire into more than 450 restaurant locations worldwide as well as an airline, casino, auto racing series and golf tour in the Hooters name. He also owned food supplier Naturally Fresh Foods.
Brooks died at the age of 69 in 2006, and following family estate disputes and legal wrangling between groups competing to acquire Hooters, the sale of the company was completed in January 2011 to Chanticleer Holdings Inc., headed by Coastal Carolina graduate Mike Pruitt.
Brooks remained as CEO and president for a short time before being let go by the company in July 2011.
That’s when the rivalry between Hooters and Twin Peaks, which was founded in Texas in 2005, intensified.
Without a parting contract or non-compete agreement, Brooks soon thereafter contacted Twin Peaks founder and chairman Randy DeWitt and began opening franchises, and he is now the company’s largest franchisee.
Brooks created La Cima, which in Spanish translates to “the top” or “the peak,” with several other former Hooters executives to establish his franchises, and he is the CEO and president of the company.
Hooters sued Brooks and La Cima claiming former Hooters executive Joseph Hummel downloaded “confidential and proprietary” company information when he resigned and joined La Cima.
The case was dropped in 2012 and Brooks proclaimed in a news release: “We don’t need their documents; we wrote them.”
Hooters was sold by Chanticleer Holdings and H.I.G. Capital in 2019 to Nord Bay Capital and TriArtisan Capital Advisors, though the previous owners retained stakes in the chain.
Brooks said he chose to get involved with Twin Peaks because of the strong track record the restaurants had established in a short time.
“In the latter part of the family being involved with Hooters, every time a Twin Peaks was opening it was killing us, and I’m not saying just by a little bit, they were blasting us left and right,” Brooks said. “. . . That’s the only concept that did that kind of damage to us.”
He likes the location of his Myrtle Beach store in part because it’s next to a Bass Pro Shops, and there is a long-term plan to revitalize the mall area as an outdoor shopping center called “The District.” The preliminary plan calls for a Market Common-style shopping center that would reach the Intracoastal Waterway, with a boutique hotel and boat access.
“We don’t really look at what competition is around us, whether it’s a Hooters or any other competition. We look to see where people are and what kind of business they’re doing,” Brooks said. “Barefoot Landing is a tried and true development down there that’s been doing good forever and we’re sort of mixed markets between North Myrtle Beach and south Myrtle Beach.
“Bass Pro is a good client base for us. They’re about sports and recreation and our concept is about sports and recreation . . . and I hope they’re going to go through with [The District] and redevelop this whole market and put stuff on the waterway.”
This story was originally published May 27, 2021 at 5:21 PM.
