Angie’s Lobster, a highly anticipated drive-thru concept from the founders of Salad and Go, hasn’t even opened a restaurant yet and it already is taking measures to ensure menu prices don’t go up.
The company, which was founded by Tony Christofellis and his wife Roushan, has acquired a wharf on Bailey Island – about 2,300 miles away from Phoenix – and started a lobster processing operation in Maine. Christofellis said from day one he wanted his prices to be fixed – $9.99 for a lobster roll meal – but with historically high inflation prices, he said one of the only ways he could afford to do that was by buying the lobster straight from the lobstermen.
This has always been a goal for Angie’s Lobster, but Christofellis said that the plan was to acquire operations on the East Coast in five to 10 years. But with construction delays slowing down the opening of the drive-thrus, Christofellis said he and his support team started focusing on ways of cutting down costs and when the opportunity to buy a wharf came up, he jumped.
“We wanted to be as vertically integrated as we could,” Christofellis said. “No one has done this. At Salad and Go, the closest we got was buying from a packer – we couldn’t get to the farm.”
