This is an English adaptation of a FoodBud historical article originally published on October 25, 2021.
A previous FoodBud article on Portillo's IPO incorrectly described the chain as backed by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. The prospectus used the shortened name “Berkshire,” and that was misread.
The correct investor is Berkshire Partners, not Berkshire Hathaway.
That matters because the two firms are unrelated in this context. Berkshire Partners is a Boston-based private equity firm founded in 1986. Its funds have invested in a range of retail and consumer businesses, including children's toy company Melissa & Doug, grocery retailers Grocery Outlet and Farm Boy, and apparel brand Citizens of Humanity.
FoodBud apologizes for the error. The mistake came from focusing on Portillo's operating model and failing to double-check the investor reference in the prospectus.
The original operating analysis remains useful. Portillo's showed several features worth watching:
1. While many chains were simplifying SKUs, Portillo's continued to offer a broader menu and more varied choices.
2. Its restaurants did not follow a single design template. Each location had its own theme and visual style, a direction also seen among many offline experiential-space operators.
3. Portillo's used a large-store model. Unit size was roughly comparable to Haidilao restaurants in China, which partly explains the slower pace of expansion. The company had started testing smaller stores at about half the size of its large-format units.
4. The company had not closed a restaurant over many years. One reason was its rent and lease strategy: rent cost was around 5%, and once the company secured a restaurant property, it would still need to keep paying the landlord even if the restaurant stopped operating. That structure gave it a strong reason to keep units open.
The Portillo's prospectus had been reviewed early, and after the FoodBud article appeared, many other self-media accounts repeated the same incorrect “Berkshire” point without checking the filing themselves.
For operators, investors, and analysts, the lesson is simple: when trying to understand the real condition of a company, it is still necessary to read the prospectus or primary filing directly.
The correction also recalls the story of Oobah Butler and The Shed at Dulwich, a fake restaurant that became a famous example of how online restaurant rankings can be gamed.
Before becoming widely known online, Butler said he had once been paid to write fake positive restaurant reviews on review sites, earning 10 pounds per review. He noticed that some highly ranked restaurants appeared to owe their position less to actual quality than to online image management. He had never visited the restaurants he had praised.
In April 2017, Butler created a new phone number and used it to register a restaurant account. He listed his own backyard as the address of a fictional restaurant called The Shed at Dulwich.
The food photos looked like high-end molecular cuisine, but the dishes were fake and inedible. One plate used dishwashing liquid and shaving foam. A “chocolate dessert” was a sponge sprinkled with instant coffee powder, with shaving foam as cream and paint as “chocolate sauce.”
On May 5, 2017, the review site approved the page. At that point, The Shed at Dulwich ranked 18,149th among London restaurants, almost at the bottom.
Butler's goal was to make the nonexistent restaurant number one.
To climb the rankings, he recruited people to post long, enthusiastic, detailed reviews. The comments had to sound serious and varied rather than generic. He also brought in some celebrities to help make the restaurant appear more credible.
After several weeks, the restaurant broke into the top 10,000. Then the first booking call arrived. Because the restaurant did not exist, Butler told the caller that it was fully booked for the next six weeks.
Soon after, another booking request came in: a 70-year-old person's birthday party for nine people, booked four months ahead. His inbox filled with dozens of reservation requests, including one person who tried to use a television-industry connection to secure a table.
By late August 2017, four months later, The Shed at Dulwich had reached number 156 in London. Suppliers and public-sector contacts began reaching out. One food supplier sent samples to the restaurant address. Government staff emailed to suggest that the restaurant move to a newly developed district called Bromley. An Australian airline even called about producing a promotional video to show on flights worldwide.
By winter, the restaurant had risen to number 30. Calls and emails kept coming. People even approached Butler near his home asking where the restaurant was.
On November 1, 2017, The Shed at Dulwich became London's number-one ranked restaurant. At that point, not a single customer had eaten there.
The ranking attracted attention from food critics. One said the restaurant's dishes were named after emotions and sounded appealing enough to try.
The pressure became intense. Butler kept telling callers that their requested times were fully booked. Over one weekend, his phone logged 116 missed calls.
He then decided to open the fake restaurant for one night. Over four days, he converted his shabby backyard into a small home-style dining space. Because the space was tiny and normally hosted at most three people, he used every available area, including the roof, to handle more than 20 diners.
For food, he used frozen ready meals. Butler and friends drove to Iceland, the frozen-food supermarket, and spent 31 pounds on microwave-ready items such as instant soup and frozen creamy pasta. A friend who had worked part-time in restaurants served as a waiter.
To maintain the illusion, Butler invited other friends to pose as ordinary diners alongside the real customers who had waited months for a booking. He also rented domestic chickens from a farm and told guests they were like lobsters in a seafood restaurant: alive before service, and available for guests to choose.
The restaurant opened. Guests were brought to tables with small theatrical touches, including being blindfolded. Because the menu items were named after abstract emotions, Butler could serve almost any ready-made food he wanted.
A DJ played recorded ambient sounds from other restaurants so guests would not hear the microwave. Diners photographed the dishes when they arrived, and because the online reputation had been built so effectively, no one seemed to detect anything unusual.
One table even said they wanted to book again immediately because they thought the dining experience was excellent.
Butler did not charge the guests. He told them they were helping film a promotional video for television, and they accepted the free meal happily.
Eventually, the restaurant's identity was exposed. Its quality could not match the title of London's top restaurant, and its review-site page was removed. But as a stunt, it worked: Butler had fooled the site, customers, critics, and potential partners.
The broader point remains relevant for foodservice operators globally: fake review inflation and paid praise exist across review platforms and markets, so rankings should be treated as signals to verify, not facts to accept blindly.
Note: IPO, market-cap, and investor references above are historical figures from the 2021 article.