The restaurant business is said to be brutal. Capicola-thin margins, constantly changing trends and fickle, fickle customers make the prospect of owning an eatery a tough one to stomach, so to speak.

This must be especially true in Madison, a town where restaurants crowd every corner and square, where even the most dedicated foodie might have trouble keeping up with the turnover. It’s a near-saturated market to be sure, one that would seem to favor reliable standbys over start-ups, where name recognition and longevity might be valued above innovation.

Not so, at least if Alex Fortney, Marketing Director for Food Fight Restaurant Group, is to be believed. The local company, founded in the early 1990s, has been opening restaurants ever since. “The only time we’ve bought an existing restaurant was this year, when we bought Avenue bar,” he said. “But in every other case they’ve been built by us from the ground up.”

From its inception, Food Fight has been a Madison institution. Monty Schiro, primary owner and founder, grew up in Madison and worked for a brief stint at The Ovens of Brittany. After leaving for Minneapolis in pursuit of a career in architecture, Schiro returned to Madison, looking to get back into the food business. Eventually, Schiro opened a place on the east side whose name will be familiar to comfort food aficionados and hungry Library Mall wanderers alike.

“The first restaurant was Monty’s Blue Plate Diner on Atwood Avenue. That was in 1990,” Fortney said. Then, working with partners Peder Moren and Joe Krupp, Schiro added three more restaurants and a catering business in the following years, and according to Fortney, “they formed Food Fight in 1994 to provide services for the business they were building.”

Since that time, Food Fight has taken off, moving from its original diner and catering business to own majority shares in 17 restaurants, including The Coopers Tavern, Bluphies, Ocean Grill, Aldo’s Cafe and Steenbock’s on Orchard inside the new Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.

Food Fight’s business structure incentivizes the success of its general managers by encouraging them strongly to share ownership in the restaurants, and Fortney said they’re “independently run” to avoid sameness or duplication.

“Just about every restaurant is its own concept,” he said. “So when you walk into it it will look like a unique place.”

Fortney scoffed at the notion that Food Fight’s financial backing might cause managers to rest on their laurels rather than continue to improve. Rather, he said, Food Fight’s backing allows the restaurants freedom to try things which they might not be able to otherwise.

“We meet with the general managers every month and work on updating menus or campaign ideas or whatever they have that they want to work on that we can help them push form a marketing perspective,” he said.

Not that there haven’t been failures. Fortney sited the Firefly, the late Asian cafe on University, as an example of a restaurant whose success in operation didn’t match Food Fight’s financial expectations.

“It’s not like there was any sort of flaming burnout, it just wasn’t doing as well as we hoped. And when that happens we look for a way to do better,” he said. The location is now a casual Tex-Mex place called Cactus Ranch, also owned by Food Fight.

But the bottom line is service, Fortney said. “The thing that we really do, from Food Fight’s perspective, is really push hospitality. And that’s common whether it’s a fine dining place on the Square or a cafe out in Sun Prairie, you name it. We really focus on the nuts and bolts of the operation.”

With restaurants in nearly every food genre imaginable, it’s a little hard to argue with his logic. As counterintuitive as it seems, the key to the success of the multi-restaurant group might be making sure no one sees them that way. “We always try to do whatever it takes can to set the restaurants apart,” Fortney said. “We’re always trying to do something different.”