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Old Posted Dec 22, 2011, 1:38 PM
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http://post-gazette.com/pg/11356/119...pid=newspanel1

Quote:
Noodles & Co. restaurant will join the bustling Market Square scene

Thursday, December 22, 2011
By Taryn Luna, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


Rebecca Droke/Post-Gazette
The Oakland location of Noodles & Co., a restaurant chain headed by Whitehall native Kevin Reddy, opened last week. Another location will open Downtown.


It's probably no surprise that Noodles & Co., a Denver-based restaurant chain, chose Pittsburgh as the site of its first Pennsylvania eatery.

CEO Kevin Reddy, 53, was born and raised in Whitehall and went to Duquesne University. He also started his career of more than 30 years in the restaurant industry as a "fry guy" at a McDonald's in Castle Shannon.

"I started out like most teenage kids. I worked french fries and I swept them off the dining room and cleaned bathrooms," he said in a recent telephone interview from his office in Denver.

Now he heads a food establishment that offers everything from Japanese pan noodles to Wisconsin mac and cheese. In his 6 1/2 years with Noodles, the company has more than doubled in size, from 100 stores to 284 by year's end.

Last week the chain opened a new restaurant on Forbes Avenue in Oakland and a second is scheduled to open tomorrow in Market Square -- two of 12 new Noodles locations opened in the U.S. between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

"I'm looking for a really great long-term relationship with the city and I think these two restaurants are the start," Mr. Reddy said.

His personal relationship with the city is already well established. Mr. Reddy said he was born into "a good solid typical Pittsburgh middle class family." His father, who still lives here, worked in municipal management for Whitehall. His mother, who is in Colorado now, was a bookkeeper and accountant.

During high school at Baldwin, Mr. Reddy got the job at McDonald's and stuck with the fast-food giant for more than 20 years. From "fry guy" he became an hourly supervisor. By 18, he had a set of the restaurant's keys and was told the combination to the safe.

While he was attending college at Duquesne, his employer, Jim Delligatti, who is famous for inventing the Big Mac, hired him to do the restaurant's accounting -- Mr. Reddy's area of study.

After a brief stint as an accountant with Ernst and Young, he returned to work for Mr. Delligatti in the accounting office before moving up the corporate ladder. Eventually, he rose to the position of senior regional manager over 310 stores, representing more than $420 million in sales.

When McDonald's invested in Chipotle Mexican Grill in 1998, Mr. Reddy was hired by the Colorado chain and held the positions of chief operations officer and restaurant support officer. He helped oversee expansion from 13 to 420 stores over seven years.

Meanwhile, as he was working for the Mexican food restaurant in Denver -- where he still lives with his wife and three children -- he was splitting his lunches between Chipotle and Noodles & Co.

In 2005, he became president of Noodles & Co., which had been founded a decade earlier in Boulder, Colo. The next year he was named CEO and then chairman in 2008.

The company, which had systemwide sales of $300 million in 2011 and owns 80 percent of its locations, has laid out a strategy to grow the number of stores by double digits in markets around the country in the next five years.

Mr. Reddy said he hopes to expand the restaurant's presence in the Pittsburgh area to 15 to 20 restaurants here in the next three to five years.

"Pittsburgh has all of these defined neighborhoods and communities, and we would hate to see anyone struggle without a Noodles," he said.

Taryn Luna: 412-263-1985 or tluna@post-gazette.com.
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