Ford's Garage has opened its first Tennessee restaurant at 2102 Hamilton Place Blvd. in Chattanooga, adding an 8,000-square-foot, 250-seat unit to the brand's now-36-location footprint across nine states. The opening marks the latest in an active franchise buildout pushing into the South, Midwest, and Northeast.
Kitchen & Concept Scale
The Hamilton Place site is a full-service, dine-in kitchen built to support a chef-driven menu anchored by half-pound Certified Angus Beef burgers, premium entrées, shareable appetizers, and a broad craft-beer and cocktail program. Operators at this scale typically commission back-of-house packages that include heavy-duty charbroilers and flat-top griddles for high-volume burger production, dedicated fry stations for signature items like the Piston Onion Rings and Firestone Shrimp, plus a full bar rail with draft-beer systems serving local craft selections. At 8,000 square feet and 250 covers, the Chattanooga kitchen represents a mid-to-large casual-dining footprint — a segment where cooking-equipment specification increasingly centers on ventless or low-profile ventilation solutions to manage hood costs in retrofit or landlord-controlled mall-adjacent shells.
Franchisee TN Legends — a partnership that includes founder Ted Moats, a Logan's Roadhouse veteran, alongside James Blaylock, Scott Estes, and 11-year Ford's Garage veteran Swade Elliott — brings more than a century of combined hospitality experience to the buildout. That operator depth matters for equipment specifiers: experienced franchise groups tend to align closely with brand-mandated equipment packages while negotiating local service agreements with regional dealers, a dynamic relevant to anyone tracking dealer-channel activity in Tennessee and the broader Southeast.
Franchise Expansion Implications
Ford's Garage, founded in 2012 in Fort Myers, Fla., and an Official Licensee of Ford Motor Company, has grown to 36 locations, meaning its kitchen package — from griddle and fry suites to refrigeration, warewashing, and bar equipment — is being replicated at scale across multiple states. For equipment dealers and manufacturer reps operating in the Southeast, franchise rollouts of this cadence represent repeatable specification opportunities: each new unit requires a largely standardized back-of-house equipment fleet, plus commissioning, startup support, and ongoing parts and service relationships.
Chattanooga's location off I-75 near I-24, adjacent to Hamilton Place Mall, places the restaurant in a high-traffic retail corridor — the kind of site where landlord infrastructure, existing grease-trap capacity, and utility service can drive equipment selection decisions. Consultants specifying kitchens in similar mixed-use or mall-adjacent environments will recognize the balancing act between brand-standard equipment and site-specific mechanical constraints.
The restaurant operates 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday, indicating a kitchen designed for sustained, multi-daypart volume rather than a narrow service window — a throughput demand that informs warewashing capacity, refrigeration and cold-storage sizing, and prep-line configuration from the ground up.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
