Gibsons CEO Steve Lombardo joins John Traub to discuss the restaurant group's history, its approach to service, family leadership, growth, and the importance of taking care of every customer.
For anyone visiting Chicago, there are certain experiences that tend to make the list: a game at Wrigley Field, an architecture tour on the Chicago River, a view from one of the city's towers, and for many visitors, dinner at Gibsons Steakhouse. Gibsons has been part of Chicago's restaurant scene since 1989, but its reputation was not created overnight. It came from years of serving regulars, adapting to what customers wanted, taking care of people when something went wrong, and building a culture where hospitality extends well beyond the food on the table.
For this episode of the Executive Air Space Podcast, I sat down with Gibsons CEO Steve Lombardo to talk about the restaurant group's history, the family behind it, the lessons learned while scaling the business, and why service remains the foundation of everything they do.
Before Gibsons, Steve's father operated a French-American restaurant called Sweetwater in the same Gold Coast location. He had been in the restaurant and bar business since the late 1960s and early 1970s, but by the 1980s, Sweetwater had reached the end of its run. Chicago's restaurant market was also going through a difficult period, and with four children to support, he knew he needed a new idea.
That led to a restaurant research trip with Rich Melman, founder of Lettuce Entertain You. In roughly a day and a half, they visited about 25 restaurants, including several of the classic steakhouses defining the category at the time. While lighter and health-focused concepts were gaining attention, the idea they brought back to Chicago went in the opposite direction: large steaks, generous drinks, big desserts, and substantial portions.
It took nearly two years to raise the money, but Gibsons opened in 1989. Steve's father handled the relationships, concept, and much of the front-of-house experience, while his business partner, Hugo Ralli, brought an operations background that included hospitality training in Switzerland and experience managing Tavern on the Green in New York. That combination created the foundation of the business.
Steve says his father has always described the secret to Gibsons' early success with one word: survival. When the restaurant opened, it was not immediately a Chicago institution. The team had to earn customers one at a time, and Steve's father was willing to do almost anything to make sure someone left happy.
If a customer walked in before the restaurant officially opened, the answer was not automatically no. If the chef was already in the kitchen, they would see what could be prepared. If someone became frustrated waiting for a table and left, Steve's father might follow them outside trying to convince them to return. Quality, value, and portion size mattered, but so did the willingness to accommodate someone instead of hiding behind a rule.
As the restaurant became more established, local customers helped shape what Gibsons became. Regulars from the Gold Coast neighborhood would request dishes that were not on the menu, and if the kitchen had the ingredients, it would often make them. When enough people began asking for the same thing, that dish might eventually earn a place on the menu. Steve still uses that philosophy when speaking with managers: understand what the customer wants and find a way to provide it at a value they are willing to pay for.
Before social media, newspaper columnists and local personalities had enormous influence over which Chicago restaurants people wanted to visit. Gibsons gained attention through those channels, but another major part of its story came from the Chicago Bulls during their championship years.
Bulls players regularly visited Gibsons after home games, sometimes arriving around midnight and staying until the early morning. Dennis Rodman later described the way players positioned themselves around a restaurant using the triangle offense, and according to Steve, that restaurant was Gibsons. Michael Jordan had a preferred corner table at the Rush Street location where people outside could see him through the windows while he still had some separation from the crowd.
The team's presence helped bring attention to the restaurant, but the service philosophy was not supposed to change depending on who walked through the door. Gibsons describes its approach as treating new customers like celebrities and celebrities like new customers. Some public figures prefer privacy while others enjoy being recognized, but the larger point is that every customer should feel important.
For Steve's parents, there were different moments when the success of Gibsons began to feel real. One happened while the family was visiting Washington, D.C. during Steve's freshman year at Georgetown. They were eating at another steakhouse when a nearby customer began talking about a restaurant in Chicago that he believed was even better. The restaurant he named was Gibsons, and after Steve's mother overheard the conversation, his father quietly picked up the table's check.
Another moment was much less public. An employee approached Steve's mother and asked for help completing paperwork related to buying his first home. For her, that was proof that the business had become something larger than the family that founded it. It was helping employees build lives of their own.
That connection to employees remains a major part of the company. The restaurant industry has high turnover, and Steve is straightforward about the challenges of finding and retaining people. Gibsons tries to hire carefully, compensate employees well, and create an environment where people want to stay, but he believes there is another quality that is harder to teach: someone has to genuinely enjoy serving other people.
Steve grew up around the restaurants but was not initially encouraged to make them his career. His father worked six days a week, often until early morning, and Steve saw the demands of the business firsthand. He bused tables as a teenager and helped with different jobs around the restaurant, but ultimately went to law school and practiced law for nearly two decades.
Even outside the company, he stayed connected to it. He advised the business on leases, fundraising, legal matters, and other issues, and he also spent more than a decade importing wine after his father asked him to find a way to source affordable European wines for one of the group's concepts. Eventually, succession became a larger concern as Steve's father and his longtime business partners grew older.
Steve joined the business roughly 12 years ago, and today all four siblings are involved. The family is already thinking about the next generation as well. Younger family members can work hourly positions, but the expectation is that anyone interested in entering management should first gain experience somewhere else and bring that outside perspective back to the family business.
The organization today extends well beyond the original Gibsons Steakhouse. The portfolio includes multiple Gibsons and Hugo's Frog Bar locations, Gibsons Italia, Luxbar, Quartino, The Boathouse at Disney Springs, and partnerships with other hospitality brands and operators. The company has also worked with Ralph Lauren on restaurant concepts and partnered with José Andrés on restaurants in Chicago.
Expansion outside Illinois has increasingly become part of the strategy. Steve discussed opportunities in markets including Arizona, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Washington, D.C., and Las Vegas. Part of the reasoning is practical: with several restaurants already operating within a relatively small area of downtown Chicago, opening another local location often requires creating an entirely new concept.
At the time of the conversation, the company had signed a lease for a traditional Gibsons location in Nashville and was developing Gibsons Tavern in Chicago's Fulton Market. The goal is not simply to add locations, but to take concepts that already have strong brand recognition into markets where there is room to grow.
Steve joined the company when it was generating roughly $100 million in annual sales. Soon afterward, the organization opened several restaurants within a relatively short period, growing sales to approximately $150 million and increasing its workforce from around 1,000 employees to 1,500. The problem was that the back office had barely changed.
The company had grown by roughly 50 percent without making a similar investment in infrastructure, creating communication problems, management issues, and increasing pressure throughout the organization. Steve brought in an outside advisor who interviewed the leadership team and later wrote a list of problems on a board during a strategic planning session. Everyone recognized the issues immediately, but the advisor explained that the list had actually come from a textbook because they were common symptoms of a founder-led company reaching an inflection point.
The business had to become less dependent on individual people and more supported by repeatable processes and systems. That became a major focus of Steve's work over the following decade. The challenge was adding structure without stripping away the personal service that made the restaurants successful in the first place.
For Gibsons, systems are meant to reinforce the culture rather than replace it. The company uses what employees call "Hugoisms," service principles that communicate both a practical action and the reasoning behind it. One example is simple: do not ask a customer whether they would like pepper on a salad unless you are already holding the pepper grinder. The lesson is not really about pepper, but about being prepared and anticipating what the customer needs.
Those principles are repeated regularly because service standards disappear quickly when they are mentioned only once during training. Technology now helps preserve information that once existed only in employees' memories, including preferences, allergies, favorite drinks, and seating choices. The tools have changed, but the objective is the same: know the customer well enough that the experience feels personal.
Steve believes food is essentially the price of admission. The restaurant has to serve very good food to compete, but the service is what determines how the customer remembers the experience. Someone may visit Gibsons every week, while another customer may be celebrating the one anniversary or birthday dinner they have planned all year. Both should feel that the occasion mattered.
Restaurants make mistakes because there are so many human and operational variables involved. Food can be overcooked, a kitchen can fall behind, weather can suddenly send a full patio indoors, and reservations can run late. Gibsons has a saying that you can make a mistake with the food and recover through service, but if the service fails too, the customer may be gone for good.
That makes recovery part of the job. Managers and servers are given room to solve problems without waiting for several layers of approval. They can remove an item from the bill, buy a dessert, send over a drink, or make another gesture that acknowledges the problem. Those gestures are not limited to mistakes either. A regular customer might receive something unexpectedly simply because the team recognizes and appreciates their continued business.
One of the most memorable failures happened during the first year of the Gibsons Oak Brook location on Mother's Day. The restaurant was overbooked, the kitchen fell behind, and customers waited far longer than expected on a day when families had specifically chosen the restaurant for a celebration. Steve estimates that the company spent roughly $60,000 in refunds, complimentary items, and gift cards to make things right. No one wanted to repeat that day, but the long-term relationship with the customer mattered more than protecting the revenue from one service.
That long-term perspective became especially important during the pandemic. One of the hardest moments of Steve's career was informing roughly 2,000 employees through a video call that they were being laid off. The company's previously established values helped guide the decisions that followed, including helping cover health insurance premiums for displaced employees and preparing meals for team members who needed assistance.
A smaller group remained working on carryout and other available revenue opportunities. When the Paycheck Protection Program became available, Steve's legal background became particularly useful. He began reading the legislation, speaking with banks, and preparing information before applications officially opened so the company could move quickly.
The business also surveyed employees about other skills they had and found ways to put some of them to work on projects that were difficult to complete during normal restaurant operations. Dining rooms needed painting, repairs, flooring work, and other maintenance, so employees who wanted to work could help with those projects. It was one of the most difficult periods in the company's history, but it reinforced the value of taking care of the people who had helped build the business.
One of the group's most successful newer restaurants came from a location Steve initially questioned. Gibsons Italia sits along the Chicago River with a wide view of the city, but when the opportunity first came together, the surrounding area had not yet developed into what it is today.
Steve understood why the restaurant could perform well during weekday lunches, happy hours, and early dinners. What he questioned was Saturday night. Would people really travel to a part of downtown that still felt removed from the city's established dining districts?
They did. Saturday became the restaurant's strongest night, and the location significantly exceeded the group's original revenue expectations. For Steve, it became a reminder that experience and analysis are useful, but business leaders can still be wrong about how customers will respond.
The company's next Chicago concept, Gibsons Tavern, is being developed in Fulton Market with a fictional history built into the concept. The story imagines the tavern as a restaurant that existed before Gibsons itself, opened by a teamster and his wife who lived above the building in the old Fulton Market district. She began cooking meals for workers from the surrounding warehouses and food distribution businesses, and as the restaurant became more successful, it expanded room by room.
The design follows that story. The original bar area is intended to feel more casual and working-class, while the later spaces become progressively more polished. The dining room will offer more formal service, tableside presentations, and a tighter menu, while other areas will focus more heavily on classic tavern and comfort food.
Some familiar Gibsons influences will remain, but the concept is meant to have its own identity. The goal is to create something new while still making it feel connected to the history and personality of the larger brand.
Gibsons' approach to service has occasionally taken the company well outside its dining rooms. Steve shared a story from the restaurant's early years when a call came in before opening time from Jack Nicholson, who wanted food prepared to take aboard a private flight.
The hostess could easily have explained that the restaurant was not open yet. Instead, she found the chef, arranged the order, and personally drove the food to the airport. Nicholson remembered the gesture and continued contacting her whenever he returned to Chicago.
That is the type of hospitality Steve wants the organization to pursue. Rather than beginning with why something cannot be done, the first response is to see whether there is a way to make it happen. The group already handles catering and large events and is evaluating a dedicated commissary kitchen that could allow it to expand that side of the business.
Perhaps the clearest example of the company's persistence comes from what Steve calls the "restraining order story." During Gibsons' early years, a regular customer arrived for a first date on an unusually busy night without a reservation. Steve's father refused to turn him away, brought a table down from the office, found room for it in the restaurant, and seated the couple.
Unfortunately, the evening still went badly. A nearby group became loud and disruptive, an argument nearly turned into a fight, and the regular customer eventually left angry and embarrassed. Steve's father repeatedly tried to apologize, but the customer would not take his calls. After learning that the man's favorite dessert was cherry pie, he personally delivered one to his office, but even that did not work.
The attempts became persistent enough that the man's secretary eventually warned that her boss might seek a restraining order if the calls continued. Through a mutual friend, Steve's father finally arranged a dinner where they could speak in person. Over the course of the evening, he repaired the relationship, and the customer later became one of the restaurant's most valuable long-term relationships, with both him and his law firm regularly hosting dinners and events there.
The restaurant eventually named a dessert after him: Jerry's Cherry Pie. The story has become part of Gibsons culture because it captures the attitude that existed from the beginning. When a relationship matters and something goes wrong, make the effort to repair it.
Steve does not view expansion as valuable simply because it makes the company larger. Growth gives employees somewhere to go next. Without new restaurants and new opportunities, talented people eventually reach a ceiling unless someone above them leaves.
Expansion also allows the company to serve more customers, which connects directly to Gibsons' stated purpose: every customer must leave happy. That applies to the couple celebrating an anniversary, the family gathering after a funeral, the regular who stops in every week, and the traveler experiencing the restaurant for the first time.
Gibsons began as a single Chicago steakhouse trying to survive. More than three decades later, the organization is considerably larger, but the underlying philosophy remains remarkably similar: listen to the customer, take care of the people doing the work, pay attention to the details, and when something goes wrong, do what it takes to make it right.
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