Since launching six years ago, Tom’s Watch Bar has grown to 18 locations by catering to fans on their way into or out of stadiums—with dozens more on the way. Welcome to the best seat not in the house.
With its technologically supercharged ordering system and some speedy servers, Tom’s Watch Bar can get food to your table less than eight minutes after the ticket is rung up—and can bring you a beer in under two.
The sports bar chain’s expansion only seems that fast.
Since launching with four locations in 2019, Tom’s Watch Bar has grown to 13 restaurants in 2024 and 16 this year. On Thursday, that number will climb to 18 as the chain unveils its two newest venues, in Cincinnati and Milwaukee. And there are more on the lineup: Tom’s is aiming to open two more outlets in 2025, and another 10 to 13 each subsequent year.
Despite a crowded market featuring established chains such as Buffalo Wild Wings, Beef ‘O’ Brady’s and Walk-On’s Sports Bistreaux—not to mention scores and scores of local watering holes—Tom’s Watch Bar has seen its core business revenue rise about 4% over last year, and its run rate (factoring in the new locations) has soared past $100 million, with its outlets averaging more than $6 million in sales. Every store is also profitable, with restaurant-level margins exceeding 25% on average and all 18 locations company-owned. That sort of success is notable in a tough segment where the once-mighty Hooters is looking to rescue itself from bankruptcy, after it filed for Chapter 11 in March and abruptly closed more than 30 of its roughly 300 locations.
Tom’s appeal includes an elevated menu offering lobster tacos and craft beers and its dedication to a 360-degree viewing experience on game day, cramming each restaurant with more than 100 televisions tuned to multiple sports around the country. But Tom’s strategy isn’t just about the sports on its screens; it’s also about the athletes playing nearby.
Of Tom’s now-18 units, 15 are adjacent to a stadium or arena, capitalizing on the foot traffic being generated by a nationwide trend toward building up the neighborhoods surrounding sports venues—developments that often feature both commercial and residential real estate and are sometimes known as entertainment districts, ballpark villages or sport-anchored mixed-use districts (SMDs).
“All of our demand is driven by sports,” cofounder and co-CEO Brooks Schaden says, adding: “We’ve looked at a lot of quasi-suburban-type locations where there’s a lot of people, really attractive demographics, fit our customer profile—but they’re crickets by 7:30. That’s probably not going to work very well for us, even though all of the data would point to it.”
Tom’s Watch Bar was born in 2014 as Tom’s Urban, an upscale diner concept from experienced restaurant operators within the Denver-based family office SIF Partners. Tom Ryan, its eponymous cofounder, had helped introduce Pizza Hut’s stuffed crust and served as a McDonald’s executive. Rick Schaden—Brooks’ cousin—ran Quiznos for 15 years. Together, they founded Smashburger in 2007.
After selling that chain to Jollibee Foods Corporation, which bought a 40% stake in 2015 at a $335 million valuation and then spent $100 million to acquire another 45% in 2018, Ryan and the Schadens turned their focus to their four Tom’s restaurants: three at casinos in Connecticut, Las Vegas and Washington State and one in the entertainment complex surrounding the Lakers’ and Kings’ home, now known as Crypto.com Arena, in Downtown Los Angeles.
“What we started noticing is, as we added some TVs, and because we were in a sports environment, all of a sudden we were really busy on a Monday,” says Brooks Schaden, whose background is in private equity and investment banking and who served as chief financial officer before officially taking on the co-CEO title last year. “I was out there once for a Lakers game that started at 7:30, and normally we would’ve emptied out, but I happened to be there for Monday Night Football—I think it was Seahawks-49ers—and we were still half-full at 8:30. And it was these little light bulbs that started going off.”
With that early success, the cofounders—including Shannon McNiel, a former Texas Roadhouse and Darden Restaurants executive who joined in 2018 to run operations and is now co-CEO alongside Schaden—decided to rebrand the Tom’s concept in 2019. Their survey of the sports bar landscape made them confident that there were easy ways to stand out.
For instance, at many bars, “you call and say, ‘Hey, are you guys going to show the Michigan game on Saturday?’ And it’s the bartender saying, ‘Yeah, maybe if you come in, I’ll turn it on,’” Schaden says. Tom’s committed to meticulously curating its TV calendar—making sure to appeal to fantasy football players and sports bettors who are interested in watching more than just the local team—and publishing the schedule online well in advance of game day.
The payoff came quickly. “I’d never seen $15,000 hours,” McNiel says. “I’m not talking days—I’m talking hours.”
Schaden credits McNiel with adapting Tom’s service model to buck the conventional restaurant wisdom to turn tables quickly and instead encourage fans to linger throughout the day’s sports slate, but he knows they’re not exactly reinventing the wheel. “Everything we’ve done is less about trying to bring something fundamentally new to a market or create an entire vertical—it’s taking something that’s familiar but twisting the frame a little bit,” Schaden says. “The old casual dining brands—Applebee’s, Chili’s, Fridays—were losing relevance. Our view was that the consumer didn’t go away; it’s just these brands didn’t evolve into something modern.
“For us, it was just saying, all right, if we’re going to go toward sports, let’s go fully after sports.”
Team Captains: Co-CEOs Brooks Schaden and Shannon McNiel are aiming to open 10 to 13 new Tom’s Watch Bar locations each year.
Tom’s Watch Bar
That approach came at an opportune time. Developments including the Battery in Atlanta, which opened in 2017 around the Braves’ Truist Park, and Green Bay’s Titletown District, which opened the same year in the 45 acres surrounding the Packers’ Lambeau Field, helped set off a real estate rush by sports teams and their owners, which in some cases now include growth-obsessed private equity firms.
Recent research by Klutch Sports Group and RBC found that at least 37 sport-anchored mixed-use districts had been announced across the five major North American professional leagues as of December 2024. While the trend is still in its early days, with only about 20% of the 260 venues in the five leagues currently situated in an SMD, the study suggested that, given the dozens of venue renovation and construction projects set to get underway in the next few years and the opportunity to export the model abroad, the industry could see more than $100 billion in investment over the next 15 years.
The developments are intriguing as a mostly untapped source of revenue for sports franchises, which have seen their valuations skyrocket over the last two decades thanks to an explosion in media rights fees but may have a harder time staying on that trajectory now that many of their lines of business are starting to look fully optimized. Other benefits: Teams fully retain the rent they charge as landlords, unlike other revenue streams they may have to share with their leagues, and the steady foot traffic in the districts can push up the value of stadium sponsorships.
There is also synergy with the surrounding businesses, which benefit from a steady calendar of not only games but concerts and other events. The Klutch-RBC report noted that the Battery’s 10.3 million visitors in 2023 spent an average of 209 minutes in the district—more than an hour longer than the average MLB game length—and found that SMDs produced five times as many visitors as sports venues themselves would generate in a given year.
“We look at it as the full experience we’re bringing to the fan,” says Aaron Eisel, the Reds’ senior vice president of revenue. “We want it to be a before, after and during game experience.”
Taking advantage of a soft real estate market during the Covid-19 pandemic, and fueled by a $30 million capital raise in 2022 led by Sagard Credit Partners, Tom’s Watch Bar began to partner with sports franchises across the country. It was among the first tenants in Denver’s McGregor Square, which the Colorado Rockies opened in 2021, and now has five other locations where the landlord is actually a team or its owner: Cincinnati (the Reds), Los Angeles (Kings), Milwaukee (Bucks), Sacramento (Kings) and Seattle (Kraken).
“They’ll help us market and go connect us with partnerships because they want to help us drive traffic,” says Schaden, who notes that teams can tap into their ticket-buyer email rosters on Tom’s behalf. The chain also partnered with the UFC this year to host watch events, McNiel says.
Tom’s took over the Cincinnati space in August from the locally based Nation Kitchen and Bar, reopening almost immediately—much faster than the typical nine months it takes from lease signing. The Milwaukee deal closed in September, after a mutual connection with the Sacramento Kings gave Tom’s a vote of confidence. The chain is moving into the Bucks-owned space formerly occupied by the Mecca, a sports bar in the 30-acre Deer District that had been run by the team and its concessionaire.
“It took us a while to open up to the idea of bringing someone in because we’re selective, but they check every box,” says Michael Belot, the Bucks’ senior vice president of business operations and chief real estate development officer. “They’ll do it better than we did.”
Tom’s obviously has a long way to go to catch up to Buffalo Wild Wings—with its roughly $4 billion in 2024 sales and 1,323 U.S. locations, according to foodservice research firm Technomic—but the chain has a database of 700 to 800 sites it’s considering around the country, including 60 to 70 it’s actively reviewing and 10 to 15 where it’s in active discussions.
Because of the feast-or-famine nature of entertainment districts—Tom’s Denver location, for example, posted $200,000 in sales on Rockies opening day but just $2,000 three nights earlier—the chain is thorough with its investigations into not only cities but specific blocks, forecasting traffic and scrutinizing demographics. It’s also protecting against the downside by structuring some of its rent agreements as a percentage of monthly sales, rather than a fixed cost.
Schaden says two of the next Tom’s units are likely to be located in casinos, where the chain can count on foot traffic for a similar strategy, and the cofounders are trying to stay adaptable, looking at spaces anywhere between 4,000 and 20,000 square feet. To pay for the expansion, Tom’s is in the midst of an equity raise, targeting around $50 million.
“Quite frankly, the opportunity set that we see out there is bigger than we can even handle,” Schaden says. “Our biggest risk right now is making sure you don’t go too fast.”