Bread Butter & Butter Concepts owner Alan Gaylin, who operates four different restaurant concepts at five locations in the Kansas City area, is still learning the lay of the land—at least when it comes to where he should open his next local restaurant.

“How does an operator know that he’s opening a restaurant too close to another of his restaurants, and he’s going to take some of his customers away from his other locations and not make enough new customers?” Gaylin said. “It’s hard to know that. You can look at all the research, but it’s a difficult decision to make.”

The topic is familiar to Kelly Manning, owner of Tavern in the Village in Prairie Village and the subsequent Tavern at Mission Farms in Leawood.

“There was a concern that we might be taking from one to support the other,” Manning said. “They’re only about 15 minutes apart, and they’re both on Mission Road. But the restaurant in Prairie Village has continued to do well, and we haven’t lost sales there to support the one in Leawood.”

Manning’s two restaurants are six miles apart and draw most of their customers from separate three-mile radiuses, yet their relative proximity is an added strength, he said.

“Three miles is the draw for a neighborhood restaurant,” Manning said. “If you have two three-mile circles and there’s a mile of overlap in the middle, at some point you get to draw your circle a little bit bigger, because you have a larger area to draw from with two. With the two, your message gets to more people.”