How does a former government prosecutor come to own nearly 20 restaurants, including four and counting in Arlington? By picking up where others left off.
“The good thing about being an attorney is, you look at other people’s mistakes,” Fitzgerald Lewis says of the unexpected detour that landed him in the hospitality business.
A native of Pakistan who came to the U.S. four decades ago to attend a bible college in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Lewis went on to earn a law degree from Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon. He spent a few years as a prosecutor for various government agencies before establishing his own law practice in Falls Church in 1996.
Ten thousand cases later (his estimate), he took a sabbatical of sorts in 2011 when a client invited him to buy into a company that managed seven Denny’s restaurants in the DMV.
“I was their lawyer … so I knew how much money they were making. It was a good investment,” Lewis says.
The venture was smooth sailing until covid hit and Denny’s franchisees were instructed to close their doors. “We went from sales of $1 million-plus a month to zero,” he says.
And yet the pandemic didn’t ruin restaurants for the enterprising businessman. Instead, it made him more aware of how often chefs burn out, consumer tastes change, neighborhood demographics shift and buildings fall into disrepair—all things he realized he could capitalize on.
In 2022, Lewis bought Barley Mac (now closed) in Rosslyn from restaurateurs Mike Cordero and Scott Parker. Two years later, he added Green Pig Bistro, originally the brainchild of chef Scot Harlan, to his portfolio. More recent acquisitions include Buena Vida Gastrolounge in Clarendon, Dudley’s Sport and Ale in Shirlington and the soon-to-be-renamed Fire Works Pizza in Courthouse.
“I’m just a numbers guy,” he jokes, rejecting the mantle of “restaurateur” on the grounds that he is constitutionally incapable of being creative. “I come from a culture which prohibits innovation.”
His track record says otherwise. Under his watch, the restaurants in his portfolio have responded to the meteoric rise in takeout orders (a shift that began during covid) by introducing food that travels well. They’ve cross-trained kitchen staff at multiple stations to assuage scheduling crunches. And they’ve leaned into unimpeachable customer service. “You have to make sure things are right,” Lewis says.
The other secret sauce in his growing empire, he claims, is surrounding himself with talented people and getting out of their way. It’s encouraging Green Pig’s current chef, Angelique Villar, to share her Filipino heritage in dishes like lechon kawali (deep-fried pork belly) and allowing an ambitious line cook to try her hand at desserts.
It’s also trusting his son, Andrew, with whom he’s worked side-by-side for years—first at the law firm and now in hospitality—to tackle whatever needs doing, from property management and vendor relations to branding.
In the end, there are lessons to be learned from Denny’s. The six D.C.-area diners that Lewis still owns may not be trendy, but they’ve survived market fluctuations that killed far sexier concepts. Andrew Lewis says analyzing the day-to-day operations of those 24-hour breakfast haunts helps him troubleshoot across the board. “Anything I do in any one of our restaurants teaches me a dozen things to try at another,” he says.
Soon, that will include a couple more local ventures they’ve got in the works.