Preceding the Virginia Beach opening last month was a tremendous amount of research, both for the company's first Hampton Roads location and for the expansion of the original concept.

"This is more like an American brasserie," says company President and CEO Robert Giaimo, 49, who opened his first restaurant while a freshman at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

The Virginia Beach store, the company's 12th, also is first in the chain to feature a full bar, he says. The store's sales here have been "outstanding" grossing $10,000 on Saturday (July 1) alone, Giaimo says.

The Virginia Beach diner is a free-standing restaurant appointed with silver gleam and retro décor. The company's original stores actually still were standard diners, but the 170-seat Virginia Beach store is a redesigned version.

By "value-engineering" walls, windows, rooflines and kitchen space, the company has not only lowered construction costs from $1.8 million to $1.35 million per store, but also managed to create larger seating spaces that no longer resemble a diner's typically cramped style. While the smaller kitchens led to a reduction in the number of ingredients, "the perception is of more choice," he says.

The redesign of free-standing diners-the company also redesigned its mall stores - is part of an effort to improve Silver Diner's profits and take the concept nationwide through company-owned and franchised stores.

Still, the symbol of America's most democratic dining establishments - diners are a melting pot of the young and the old, the rich and the working-man, Giaimo says - is one that inspired the Silver Diner concept.

In the late 1980's, after he had sold his chain of American Café restaurants, Giaimo, fellow proprietor and Chef Ype Von Hengst and "American Diner" author Richard J.S. Gutman traveled across the country for a year to study diners from California to Florida.

Giaimo brought together a seven-member board of directors and "gave them a vision," he says. Board members include business executives, including Louis P. Neeb, president of Steak & Ale and former executive of such chains as Burger King and Spaghetti Warehouse.

The publicly traded company (Nasdaq: SLVR) got its start in suburban Washington, D.C., and now is getting ready to take the concept national.

"There will be 500 to 1,000 on Main Streets across America," Giaimo says.

"This is going to be the next McDonald's".

Virginia Beach is the company's first entry in the South Atlantic market and therefore is a test operation, he says.

Part of the Silver Diner Inc.'s formula is location, essential to generate traffic almost around the clock. Breakfast and dinner sales are driven by residential traffic; lunch depends on the business crowd, and late night business stems from adjacent entertainment, Giaimo says. The company's busiest store in Rockville, Md., has about 13,000 customers a week on 5,000 square feet with 20 table turns.

The Virginia Beach location, half a block from the Barnes and Noble bookstore and the Columbus 12 movie theaters, close to the planned Virginia Beach Town Center, Pembroke Mall and Princess Anne High School, fulfills all the location requirements and then some. The new site is in a market of 300,000 people who are within a five-mile radius; 60,000 people a day drive in front of the diner on Virginia Beach Boulevard, he says. "It's a representative site."

Giaimo first considered an opening in Virginia Beach after his restaurant scout introduced him to Gerald Divaris, CEO of Divaris Real Estate Inc., during an International Council of Shopping Centers convention in Las Vegas two years ago. Virginia Beach, Giaimo says, is "a really mature, vibrant marketplace. We see major retailers coming here."

Giaimo signed a 20-year-lease with three five-year renewal options. It, however, will not be the company's only regional location.

Giaimo says he is looking at a location close to Greenbrier Mall in Chesapeake, another one close to Scope in Norfolk and a third one in the Patrick Henry Mall on the Peninsula. The Hampton Roads expansion also will coincide with an expansion into the North Carolina market, possibly around Raleigh, and into New Jersey.