Noted restaurateur Paul Fleming moves brand from California to Florida

Restaurateur Paul Fleming, founder of both an eponymous well-known steakhouse and a billion-dollar upscale Asian brand, is ordering more Florida for 2026 — and beyond. 

The Sunshine State, says Fleming, founder of Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar, P.F. Chang’s China Bistro and sister brand Pei Wei Asian Diner, “is the best place in the country to do business. It's just much more efficient — that’s the best word I can think of.”

Fleming and his wife and business partner, Jody Goodenough-Fleming, now want their growing company, Naples-based Paul Fleming Restaurant Group, to reflect that. One big move to back that up: in October the firm moved the corporate offices of its Paul Martin’s American Grill concept from California to Naples. 

Good environment 

Founded in 2006, Paul Martin’s — Martin is Paul Fleming’s middle name — has seven locations, split between five in California and one each in Arizona and Texas. The company is currently scouting for spots for Paul Martin’s locations in Southwest Florida and hopes to have a place in Naples and/or Estero sometime next year. Expansion for the brand to Tampa and Miami is also on the horizon.

“We are delighted to bring the Paul Martin’s business to our talented Florida management team, expanding our enterprise and preparing this brand for future growth,” Goodenough-Fleming says in a statement. “We love our local community and are proud supporters of the entrepreneurial spirit and pro-business environment embodied by the Sunshine State.”

Paul Martin’s is one of four brands in the PFRG portfolio, joining Lake Park Diner, PJK Neighborhood Chinese and Paulitas’ Taqueria. The company opened a second Lake Park Diner in North Naples and a second PJK Neighborhood Chinese location in Coconut Point, Estero over the past year. While no longer majority owners, the company also maintains a partnership with the Fleming’s Steakhouse brand and has invested in several other startup hospitality concepts. All of the marketing, branding, HR, accounting, IT and more for those concepts will now be done out of an office in Old Naples, near Fifth Avenue South. It has some 10 employees in the corporate office; officials declined to disclose annual sales figures for PFRG. 

“We're starting to consolidate our businesses for all the reasons we know about and the country knows about, and not picking on any states, but Florida is just vibrant, healthy, has great colleges, you can recruit good people here,” Fleming says in an early November interview. “People want to be here. You don't have to convince people to move here. It's a good base to recruit from, and people don't want to leave here.”

Other fields

Naples residents for about a decade, the couple — he’s from Louisiana, she’s from Idaho — is busy on the Naples philanthropic scene. They have supported the Naples Children Foundation and are trustees for the nationally-known Naples Winter Wine Festival. Other organizations they support include Sisters of Humility of Mary, Lake Park Elementary, the Guadalupe Center and the Golisano Children’s Museum.

Photo by Stefania Pifferi

The couple comes to restaurants from other fields: Fleming worked in the oil and gas business in Denver prior to getting into restaurants in the early 1980s, when he acquired the rights to the Ruth’s Chris Steak House brand for California, Arizona and Hawaii. Fleming’s Steakhouse debuted in 1998. Goodenough-Fleming, meanwhile, is a trained commercial air pilot. She flew for a company in the music industry, and earlier in her career was part of humanitarian medical transport flights for health care organizations.

Working in other fields, combined with their hospitality experience, has led the couple to emphasize some core principles in building PFRG — beyond the focus on Florida. The list includes: 

• Face to face: California’s closed-down Covid-era policies took a toll on the morale of many employees, the couple says. And that reinforced a lesson: nothing beats an in-person working environment. “We are an in-office company, so we do not allow remote working. And I think after Covid, people struggled with that on the West Coast, they honestly didn't want to go back to the office,” Goodenough-Fleming says in the interview over Zoom with Paul Fleming in November. “But we are hands on. We're a tight group, and from a management standpoint, it's easier for us to be hands on when we could actually see everyone.” Fleming adds that he saw something of a have-have not situation in restaurants in California during Covid, where the corporate offices were closed, but the actual locations were open. “They had everyone else out in the field working, right? There's still some resentment in the country about that,” Fleming says, “and that's part of the problem in California, is all the operators were out working, but no one was in the corporate offices. Whereas in Florida, you could go to work right away.” 
• Value play: While Fleming’s is on the higher-end of the overall steakhouse category, Fleming stresses his food philosophy has long been to prioritize value. “We have as good or better food than most steakhouses in the country,” he says, “and probably charge 15 to 20% less.” He says the strategy was the same at PF Chang’s, and is the same with PFRG brands today. “We know what a fair markup is to stay in business, but not gouge people,” he says. With inflation, value is ever-more pressing "because we have zero pricing flexibility.” 
• Butts in seats: A cousin to value, Fleming says, is volume, in that he looks not only at sales but foot traffic to check how a restaurant is doing. His analysis? Sales are OK in the industry, but the amount of people coming in is down. “A lot of rich people are coming in and spending a little more money,” he says “But that's not a formula.” To combat that, PFRG has run incentive programs for Collier County residents “because,” Fleming says, “I'd rather have a lot more bodies than dollars.”
• Prioritize people: Both Goodenough-Fleming and Fleming emphasize finding and keeping good people — and paying them well — is the backbone of any good restaurant. They will seek to bring that same strategy in expanding PFRG’s current brands. “I think we have a good culture,” Fleming says. “We're good people. We take care of people, we compensate more than other industry people. We give people incentive to stay a long time.”