Guests at The Capital Grille in Ho Chi Minh City don’t walk in from the street; they take a private lift to the 50th floor of Bitexco Financial Tower, where the restaurant opened last month. Diners eat with the city laid out below them. It is the first Capital Grille in Asia, an American fine-dining steakhouse owned by Darden Restaurants. It is also the first restaurant in Vietnam for Ko Hospitality Group, the Taipei family company that operates it under franchise. Over close to two hours at a
s at a media roundtable, Stanley Ko, president of Ko Hospitality, laid out how a privately held, second-generation family business decides where to plant a US$100-a-head American brand, and why it is prepared to wait longer than most investors would for the answer.
The operator behind the brand
Ko Hospitality was founded in Taipei in 1984 and now operates in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines and Mainland China. Its portfolio runs from Ruth’s Chris Steak House and The Capital Grille to Ramen Nagi and two chef-led restaurants with Michelin pedigree: Raw, with chef André Chiang, and Koichiro, with chef Oshino Koichiro.
Both of its American steakhouse brands now sit inside Darden, which bought Ruth’s Chris in 2023. At the end of May, Darden reported 74 company-owned Capital Grille restaurants in the US and no franchised ones in Asia. Ho Chi Minh City is the first.
Brad Smith, president of Darden Franchising, said in the launch statement that Vietnam’s economic growth, changing fine-dining scene and business community made it the ideal market for the first location in the region.
Why Vietnam
Ko said the group’s starting point was the economy. Vietnam grew 8.02 per cent last year, according to the National Statistics Office, and has set itself a double-digit target for this year. But he was clear that the headline numbers were only the framework.
“The investment decision is kind of a science, a framework,” he said. “But interpreting data is somewhat of an art, and it goes with intuition as well.”
He described that intuition as something built over years of visits rather than a single research trip. Taiwanese family friends with power and infrastructure businesses in Vietnam had shared what they had seen of the country’s growth. Members of his US team are Vietnamese-American. Ko said he had been travelling to the country for about a decade, eating his way through restaurants in the key districts to judge service levels, training and price points against what he knew from other markets.
He also drew a line between his job and an analyst’s.
“When analysts are modelling a particular project, you can put anything in the spreadsheet,” he said. “But as an operator, I’m responsible for delivering those numbers, so we kick the tyres. Does this number make sense or not?”
The change he saw came after the pandemic.
“Covid-19 was an extinction-level event for everybody in the hospitality business,” Ko said. “After the pandemic, I would say it’s picked up hard.” He described it as an inflection point he had watched other Asian markets pass through before, when Western concepts arrive in numbers and diners start to look for them.
Timing, and three years to find a site
Ko returned several times to timing. “Hospitality is very fickle,” he said. “You can be two blocks from success, you can be two years, five years before success, or five years too late.”
Because the group is privately held, he said, it was not working to a development schedule. Finding the Bitexco space took three years. Ko said the team first narrowed down districts, then looked at sites well beyond the city centre even after deciding that District One was where it wanted to be. He credited the habit to his late father, who told him never to buy a home without first looking at 50 others, so that he would know what he was paying for.
“Even the best concept in the wrong location will go belly up,” Ko said.
The arrival of the Michelin Guide in Vietnam was not the trigger, he said, but it helped. He called it another data point: Michelin’s professionals were seeing the same opportunity his team was. He also pointed to the Park Hyatt Saigon, praising the care in its curated art collection as the kind of attention to detail he wants The Capital Grille to show.
Why The Capital Grille, and not Ruth’s Chris
Ko Hospitality already runs Ruth’s Chris across Asia, so the question in the room was why it did not lead with the brand it knows best. Ko’s answer was about who each brand attracts.
“Capital Grille skews a little bit younger. It’s more metropolitan, because of its roots in the Northeast,” he said. “Ruth’s Chris is a little bit older, maybe baby boomers. I think both will do phenomenal, but if I have to choose one first, we’ll take the younger brand.” Vietnam, he noted, has a young population.
The diaspora was the other reason. Ko pointed to The Capital Grille at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, California, close to one of the largest Vietnamese-American communities in the US. He described it as one of the busiest restaurants in the system and said Vietnamese guests he had met there were excited to hear the brand was coming to Ho Chi Minh City.
“If a lot of people already know your restaurant, don’t make it extra difficult if you don’t have to,” he said.
A family business, built to outlast
Ko works alongside his brothers, and he described the discipline that requires. He is their boss as group president, their equal as a fellow shareholder and their older brother at home.
“If I tell you to do something today, I’m wearing my CEO hat,” he said. The bigger risk, in his view, is that family businesses rarely survive to a third generation, because the hunger fades. He said the group has structured itself to guard against that.
He offered his own definition of success. “It’s just trying really, really, really hard at something for a very, very long time,” he said, “and just outlasting everybody else.”
That leaves the first year as the real test. Ko said his main concern now is getting operations up to standard as quickly as possible, and he described the full first 12 months, not opening week, as the restaurant’s opening period.
“This is my child,” he said.
A 120-seat room on the 50th floor will need local diners on ordinary weeknights, not only at launch. If it finds them, Darden will have its answer in Asia, and Ko Hospitality will have a second American steakhouse brand to grow in the region. If it does not, the cost falls on a family that says it is prepared to wait.
Dining and Cooking