If you’re traveling around downtown Nashville this weekend and hear an enthusiastic shout of “Wooooo!” don’t assume it’s coming from a pedal tavern-straddling bachelorette party.

Nor should you surmise that someone is paying homage to arguably the greatest professional wrestler of all time.

It could just be somebody receiving an order of chicken wings.

Granted, those wings would also be an homage to Ric Flair, the beloved, controversial and doggedly resilient pro wrestler who not only is performing in his “last match” this weekend at Municipal Auditorium, but also is launching his own virtual restaurant brand titled Wooooo! Wings to mark the occasion.

Nashville will be the center of the pro wrestling (or sports entertainment, depending on your allegiances) universe this weekend, what with World Wrestling Entertainment’s second-biggest live event of the year, SummerSlam, taking place at Nissan Stadium Saturday night.

WWE’s presence, especially when it runs stadium shows, brings fans from all over the globe, which organizers of the wrestling-themed convention Starrcast are taking advantage of with three days of counterprogramming at the Nashville Fairgrounds, combined with the hoopla surrounding “Ric Flair’s Last Match,” a star-studded card comprising wrestlers from multiple different companies and attracting fans who want to be in the building for the 73-year-old Nature Boy’s final in-ring performance. (For now.)

That rabid fan base, the folks who will not only travel to see such an event but also buy anything and everything with their favorite grappler’s name attached to it, is exactly the audience the team behind Wooooo! Wings and other wrestling-related virtual restaurant brands hope to reach.

“I think it will be one of the largest restaurant chains in the world,” says Mike Jacobs, CEO of Kitchen Data Systems, the California-based company that is partnering with Flair and his team to launch the new brand. “The amount of positive response and excitement around the brand is amazing. Ric has a rabid fan base that loves him, and this community around Ric is one of the coolest things that I’ve seen in business.”

Wooooo! Wings isn’t KDS’s first go-round in creating something for the pro wrestling audience, much less the virtual restaurant branding space. The company also runs the Powerbomb Pizza brand, which currently partners with more than two dozen pizzerias in nine states to deliver customers wrestler-themed pizzas.

The Flair-branded wings concept, which can be ordered through www.ricflairwings.com, will launch out of three restaurants in Nashville this week, along with locations in Huntsville and Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Jacksonville, Florida; and San Antonio, Texas.

Jacobs, a career technologist with a depth of experience in the restaurant industry, having been involved with restaurant systems makers Nextbite and Ordermark in the past, created Kitchen Data Systems to work with existing restaurant brands to streamline their services and to deploy these kinds of celebrity-driven brands.

“Ultimately, Kitchen Data Systems, at its core, is the restaurant chain,” Jacobs says. “We’re working with independent restaurants nationally at the moment, launching a couple new locations a day, working with the operators and, soup to nuts, helping them do everything from purchasing all their raw materials to launching amazing brands like Ric Flair’s Wooooo! Wings.”

Virtual restaurant rise

Burger Dandy made the transition from virtual to brick and mortar with the opening of its restaurant in Franklin.

-- Photograph Courtesy Of Burgar Dandy

While the idea of virtual restaurant brands isn’t new, it’s one that exploded as the food service industry grappled with the earliest waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-21. Restaurants struggled with how to stay afloat despite closed locations, reduced staff, capacity caps on dining areas, the still-an-issue supply chain disruptions and increased demand from customers for drive-thru and home delivery options.

But more than a few enterprising companies saw the opportunity of adversity combined with innovation to create new identities for their brands, including an even more famous name in the chicken space.

Nashville has been the test market for Chick-fil-A’s Little Blue Menu brand extension, launched in October 2021. Working primarily out of the chain’s concept store that opened on Church Street in 2018, Little Blue Menu offers customers options from four sub-brands, along with standard Chick-fil-A fare, with one delivery fee, says Kanika Patrick, senior principal product lead for the company’s “Beyond the Restaurant” initiatives.

“When the pandemic began and Chick-fil-A was trying to meet customers where they were, we had a culinary developer, Stuart Tracy, that had been tinkering in the background with these other menu items that were not exactly ideal for the Chick-fil-A menu, because it takes a lot to introduce new menu items because of our supply chain and the number of stores we have,” Patrick says.

“So the decision was made to try them virtually. With Little Blue Menu, you would be allowed to order wings from Outfox Wings, the vegetables and the roasted chicken from Flock & Farm. If I’m having a cheat night, then I would probably get a burger from Because, Burger, and the kids could get their Chick-fil-A favorites, but they would all be combined into one order with one delivery with one service fee.”

Patrick admits the Little Blue Menu concept would be impractical for most Chick-fil-A locations to try to tackle, with limited kitchen and storage space for such a wide product offering. But with the company’s size and reach, it allows for further study and tweaking of the concept, including a planned rollout in College Park, Maryland, later this year.

“I think this is going to be an innovation project that continues to evolve over the next 18 to 24 months until we dial in on what it is exactly, so that we can then go back into a market and execute all those things,” Patrick says. “I’d say what our team has realized and what we’re seeing the most is that customers want their channels.

“So whether that’s delivery or pickup or curbside or drive through, customers want choice. I think that’s what we’re learning here, and how we’re trying to pivot and best serve those needs.”

MrBeast steps in

The trends in virtual restaurant brands show the efforts need scale, be it name visibility paired with the right concept or organizational size that allows for patience as the brands develop.

And sometimes you just need a massive YouTube following.

The hottest name in the virtual restaurant world last year was MrBeast, and if the name is unfamiliar to you, chances are you don’t have someone born this millennium living in your home.

MrBeast (offline name Jimmy Donaldson) has leveraged his nearly 100 million YouTube subscribers, who watch him and his cohorts do a seemingly endless stream of gamer-based (or insanely expensive) challenges, into a number of real-world opportunities, both in business and philanthropic pursuits.

One of the most visible is MrBeast Burger, a virtual restaurant chain that launched in November 2020. Joe Guszkowski, senior editor of trade publication Restaurant Business, says the virtual burger joint has tallied more than $100 million in sales across 18 months.

“They seem to have hit on the right formula: marketing to a built-in following, knowing what they are, having great packaging and having the messaging really dialed in,” Guszkowski says. “They’re really one of the only ones to have figured it out.”

At the same time, virtual brands that are primarily dependent on partnering with both delivery services such as DoorDash and Uber Eats and existing brick-and-mortar restaurants with their own challenges, will find the road ahead pretty challenging as consumer habits continue to evolve.

“The delivery side in general has started to slow down as the pandemic has started to subside, and people are more interested in dining out,” Guszkowski continues. “The virtual brands are so dependent on delivery, which was already expensive and continues to rise along with everything else.

“I think the further away we get from the pandemic, the more we’re going to see these restaurants want to focus on their actual brands.”

Marshall jumps in

That crucial focus on tangible, branded locations led to the graduation of Franklin’s Burger Dandy, founded by Puckett’s Restaurant parent company A. Marshall Hospitality, from virtual brand to brick-and-mortar restaurant.

But it also meant putting on the back burner two other concepts A. Marshall launched at the same time as Burger Dandy: the ramen-focused NASHi Noodles, run out of its Deacon’s New South venue downtown, and the Cabo-inspired Fresh96 coming out of Scout’s Pub in Franklin’s Westhaven neighborhood.

Lyle Richardson, A. Marshall’s chief operating officer, looks at the results of the company’s virtual brands not as going 1-for-3 but as a chance to hone and expand what they offer their guests across their various locations.

“Those times really gave us the opportunity to look at virtual concepts and kind of blanket our markets with more service to our guests without having to go through the process of building a restaurant,” Richardson says. “For us, we had five different concepts and added three more, so to have eight different concepts in a 15- to-20-mile radius was a huge benefit, and I think we really took advantage of that.

“I think overall virtual restaurants do have a place and have a purpose for certain individuals. On a scaled level, like a national level, celebrity-endorsed virtual concepts have a much higher success rate,” he continues. “I think it’s much harder for a mom-and-pop to pull up a virtual concept and be very successful if it’s not their market that they’re already in.”

Richardson says customer demand for Burger Dandy, which was being run out of what is now known as Americana Taphouse, precipitated the brand’s eventual physical location. “People would come in and say, ‘If I pick up my food here, can I just eat here?’ It became one of those things where people just wanted to get out and be around other people.”

He also says people shouldn’t be surprised to see NASHi Noodles and Fresh96 live on in some form.

“The great thing about ’em is, you know, anytime we do anything, they now become test results,” Richardson says. “We ran these two other virtual concepts, and they have provided data for us to utilize in the future. I’m not gonna say this is for certain, but don’t be surprised if a NASHi Noodle or a Fresh 96 pops up somewhere in the future. I think there’s opportunities there.”

Finding the secret sauce

That’s the key to any business venture, regardless of market: identifying the opportunities and taking calculated advantage of them. That will be the ongoing challenge for anything in the virtual restaurant space, as the shifting sands of technology, visibility and consumer habits will lift some up and swallow others whole.

“I don’t think it’s all about celebrity,” Guszkowski says. “You can’t just pick a celebrity, attach a concept or a product to them and expect it to work. You have to be very specific, and they have to hit the zeitgeist in a very specific way. Create a brand and a product that’s new, but feels very familiar.

“I think MrBeast Burgers has worked so well because not only does he already have a big following, the audience is younger and very online, they’re gamers already used to ordering food delivery,” he says. “It’ll be interesting to see how [the Ric Flair] concept works, because it does feel like the wrestling community hits a lot of those same boxes.”

And if it does eventually take off, you’ll hear it coming from a mile away.