Cafe Rio
1245 E Brickyard Rd, Ste 600, Salt Lake City, UT 84106
Approximately 95-100% of the Cafe Rio restaurant locations are linked in the Atlas Research Platform.
Enterprise Snapshot
(US & CAN)
Public profile metrics.
Cuisines
1 of 1 shownStates & Provinces
3 of 11 shownSummary
Cafe Rio is a Salt Lake City, Utah fast casual Mexican grill company headquartered at 1245 E Brickyard Rd, Suite 600. Steve and Patricia Stanley opened the first Cafe Rio in St. George, Utah, in 1997 around made-from-scratch Northern Mexico and Southwest-inspired recipes with a no-freezer, no-microwave kitchen culture. After growing to a small Utah cluster, Bob Nilsen and private-equity partners acquired the brand in 2004 and scaled company-owned restaurants across the West. KarpReilly backed that expansion until 2017, when Freeman Spogli & Co. acquired a majority stake while management retained equity and continued leading from Salt Lake City. Cafe Rio is the concept, and the company operates company-owned restaurants rather than a franchisee model. Locations are West-focused with additional Mid-Atlantic markets, keeping the brand's center of gravity in Mountain West and Western communities. Restaurants are fast casual and serve lunch and dinner with a Mexican or Latin menu of burritos, tacos, salads, enchiladas and fresh tortillas prepared daily. Typical units seat about 100 guests in roughly 3,000 square feet, supporting a substantial dine-in line and scratch kitchen.
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Ownership & Concepts
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Locations & Markets
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How This Profile Is Built
RestaurantData combines corporate disclosures, franchise documentation, public filings, company websites, location research, and proprietary verification. Parent-level figures may aggregate linked concepts. Certain sales and location totals are presented as estimates when companies do not publish a single current figure.
About This Enterprise Profile
The Restaurant Enterprise Index is RestaurantData’s research framework for organizing major restaurant enterprises, including franchisors, franchisees, multi-concept operators, and parent organizations.
Certain sales and location totals are presented as estimates when companies do not publish single current figures.
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The Restaurant Enterprise Index focuses primarily on companies with a substantial role in restaurant operations. Investment firms, financial sponsors, and other ownership partners are generally not included unless they also play a meaningful operating role; an otherwise qualifying entity may also be omitted when sufficient reliable information is unavailable.
The ownership hierarchy follows the entity structure from the bottom up, showing the profiled entity in relation to its parent organizations, including its ultimate parent. When the entity owns or operates concepts beneath it, up to three are displayed.
Verify Our Data Methodology
- Foundation: Active state business registries form the primary backbone of every record.
- Sources: Publicly available filings throughout, including public Franchise Disclosure Documents (FDDs).
- Integrity: Zero proprietary third-party databases utilized.
- Verification: Entity/concept records are validated at the source by our in-house research team.
Leveraging Human-Verified Connections
- Collection: Filings and public records are gathered through intake procedures.
- Verification: In-house researchers review every record before it enters the database.
- Ownership Chain: Where relationships can be established, researchers work upward from a concept headquarters or single concept through parent, grandparent, and ultimate parent, resolving operators into one connected structure.
Maintaining the Longitudinal Record
- Duration: Continuous tracking since 1997. Twenty-nine years of unit-level history.
- Method: Same methodology applied across the full period so year-over-year comparisons hold.
- Change Tracking: Openings, closures, ownership transfers, and operator consolidation are recorded as they occur, not backfilled.
- Result: Expansion and contraction trends visible over decades, not snapshots.
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