MADE TO ORDER: ALTON ESPAILLAT BUILDS A BUDDING RESTAURANT CHAIN SERVING UP STREET-FOOD FAVORITES.

• Author: Martin, Cathy
• Position: NC TREND: Food & Drink

When the construction industry stalled in the recession, Dalton Espaillat, then a project manager and estimator for Christopher Bryan Co. in Charlotte, decided he needed a side hustle. With two friends, Espaillat, who was born in New York and raised in the Dominican Republic before moving to Statesville with his family at 15, bought a "hole-in-the-wall" Mexican restaurant on Charlotte's Central Avenue, renaming it Three Amigos.

Operating a restaurant proved to be more of a challenge than the trio expected, and soon his partners bailed, leaving Espaillat to run the business. "All that debt was under my name," he says. His only restaurant experience had been at Sonic, the Oklahoma City-based drive-in chain, first as a cook then assistant manager while he was attending college. "The food [at Three Amigos] was good, but everything else was horrible." The servers didn't speak English, the menu was in Spanish and the previous owners allowed patrons to get really drunk, he says. With the help of his family (his parents now live in Charlotte), Espaillat turned the restaurant around while managing to keep his day job in construction.

Today, Espaillat, 33, has mostly traded construction for restaurants: He still owns Three Amigos, but it's his fast-casual concept, Sabor Latin Street Grill, that's propelling his company's growth. Raydal Hospitality LLC operates eight Sabor locations (pronounced sa-BOR) in the Charlotte region, with plans to open four more this year, including restaurants in Davidson, Huntersville and a flagship in downtown Charlotte. Average sales for each unit is close to $1.1 million. By comparison, sales at Chipotle restaurants averaged about $1.9 million in 2017.

After a failed effort to expand the Three Amigos concept, Espaillat opened the first Sabor in Charlotte's Elizabeth neighborhood in July 2013. He replicated only the bestselling items from Three Amigos and streamlined the menu so that a new cook can learn how to make the food in two weeks. Operating a fast-casual restaurant--customers order at the counter, then staff members deliver food on metal trays--also requires fewer employees, reducing labor costs.

Sabor wasn't an instant success. Though it offered the usual burritos, tacos and quesadillas, customers were less familiar with gorditas, Venezuelan arepas--fresh corn cakes filled with shredded chicken, diced tomatoes, onion, cheese and a creamy rosada sauce--and other Latin American fare. Everything at Sabor is made...