Virginia Beach restaurateur returns with a few restaurants

By Greg Gaudio

VIRGINIA BEACH

Restaurateur Ella Avery-Smothers has returned to Virginia with a vision.

In the middle is the historic Brunswick County schoolhouse that she attended as a child. On either side will be one of her Burger King and El Pollo Loco franchises.

"And I intend to do it if I live long enough and God keeps on blessing me," she said. "I will go full circle."

Avery-Smothers, 63, was raised on her father's Meredithville, Va., tobacco farm. She went on to run Burger King restaurants in the embattled Los Angeles neighborhoods of Compton, Watts and South Central.

After more than 25 years there, frustration with workers' compensation suits and a desire to return home brought her to Hampton Roads, where she's preparing to open four El Pollo Loco restaurants within a year.

El Pollo Loco, pronounced "L Po-yo Lo-co" and Spanish for "the crazy chicken," is a casual Mexican chain popular on the West Coast and known for its citrus-marinated, flame-grilled chicken.

Her first El Pollo Loco is to open Monday at the Red Mill Walk shopping center in Virginia Beach. It's the first in the mid-Atlantic region. Avery-Smothers has been approved to open three additional El Pollo Loco restaurants in Hampton Roads and hopes to open six others by 2009.

Avery-Smothers, a one-time elementary school teacher, said she intends to take a special interest in her young employees here, as she did in Los Angeles. In the past, she's given college-bound workers $1,000 scholarships and arranged their schedules around classes - to give those students more advantages than she had.

Planting tobacco. Worming tobacco. Picking tobacco. Stripping tobacco. When she wasn't in school, that's how Avery-Smothers remembers spending her childhood in Meredithville.

"To me it was great," she said. "Now I'm learning I was poverty-stricken."

On the outskirts of her father's farm, students from grades one through five would cram into the one-room, knotted pine St. Paul's Chapel School for their lessons. St. Paul's was one of thousands of schools funded by Sears, Roebuck and Co. mogul Julius Rosenwald at the request of Booker T. Washington to educate Southern black children.

Brunswick County closed the school in the 1960s, and Avery-Smothers bought it for $5,000 in the late '90s. Her brother restored it, and it's on the National Register of Historic Places.

"I just want it to be some type of center for enrichment of the community," she said.

Avery-Smothers said she struggled in school. It took inspiring words from a high school biology teacher to set her on the right path.

"It's the solid C+ students who are the backbone of our society," she said he told her. "You may not excel in any one thing, but if you take your C+, you'll be a valuable contribution to society."

"And that's what told me I'd be all right," Avery-Smothers said.

After earning a bachelor's degree in elementary education at St. Paul's College in nearby Lawrenceville and a master's degree from George Washington University, she married Ronald Smothers, an army officer.

He enrolled in Burger King's district manager training program, and she worked in public schools. They made stops in Miami, Detroit and San Diego before settling in Los Angeles to become Burger King franchisees.

When the couple divorced in 1992, she was left with two of their six restaurants.

Since she moved to Chesapeake in 2006, her son Ronson and a district manager have taken over daily operation of her eight Burger Kings in Los Angeles.

El Pollo Loco evaluated those restaurants before offering her a contract in '06. Under their franchise agreement, she is paying $40,000 for the first restaurant and $30,000 for each one thereafter, Avery-Smothers said.

"We felt that she had great attention to detail, that she operationally ran very good restaurants, and we had no hesitation about having her join El Pollo Loco," said Brian Berkhausen, a spokesman for the chain.

Avery-Smothers said she was happy to leave the West Coast for Virginia.

She said that at one point she and her ex-husband were paying $600,000 a year in worker's compensation insurance premiums for their 12 restaurants, leaving her with about $56,000 before taxes in profits.

She said she hopes the climate will be better in Virginia.

In California, "if they said it happened, it happened," she said. "I hear it's a much more friendly business environment here."

Greg Gaudio, (757) 222-5125, greg.gaudio@pilotonline.com