Two Hops managers and a seafood idea.

Bonefish Grill began in St. Petersburg, Florida, in January 2000, when Tim Curci and Chris Parker opened their first restaurant on the city’s Fourth Street North. English Wikipedia gives the opening day as 15 January 2000. The St. Petersburg Times, now the Tampa Bay Times, reported in August 2001 that the pair had left the Hops Restaurant Bar and Brewery chain about two years earlier to start a small chain of their own, and that a second Bonefish Grill had opened in Sarasota in April 2001, with a third due in Safety Harbor that October.

The paper described the partners as managers who had met at Hops. In a January 2004 profile it said Parker had worked on many restaurant openings there, while Curci was a chef who had trained at the Culinary Institute of America. Together, the Times reported, they came up with a concept for a seafood restaurant they called “polished casual”: something more dressed-up than a family seafood house, but less formal than a fine-dining room.

The name came after a search. According to the Times in 2001, the founders rejected several possibilities, including “Big Eyed Tuna,” before settling on Bonefish Grill.

The early restaurants drew long waits for tables, the Times reported in 2001, and in 2004 the paper credited the first Bonefish Grill with helping spark a run of restaurant openings along a stretch of Fourth Street North that had previously been better known for pawnshops and motels.

The founders worked close to the product in those first years. The 2004 profile said that for the first year and a half Curci and Parker filleted the fish themselves, to learn it as thoroughly as possible. Parker, who grew up on St. Petersburg’s Snell Isle, told the paper in 2001 that the pair had set out to do for seafood what Outback had done for steaks some years before: “We tried to do two years ago what Outback did with steaks 15 years ago,” he said.

A skeleton for a sign.

The brand’s mark is its clearest recorded design decision. When the founders chose the name, the St. Petersburg Times reported in August 2001, they also settled on “its fish-skeleton logo.” The paper returned to it in January 2004, calling it a “distinctive skeletal logo”: the bones of a fish rather than a whole, lifelike one.

The same 2004 article set the logo inside a wider idea of how the restaurants should look. At the time, the Times wrote, seafood restaurants in the area were commonly “festooned with nets and old ship’s wheels.” Curci and Parker aimed for a more upscale, uptown image instead, with “slick, snazzy graphics and table settings.” The paper’s 2001 report added that the wait staff dressed in white, placing the restaurants at a midpoint in formality between a steakhouse chain and a fine-dining room. The paper set Bonefish between Outback Steakhouse and Outback’s newer, more upscale concepts, Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse and Roy’s, a Hawaiian-themed chain.

Wikipedia describes a menu built largely around wood-grilled fish, with dishes and drinks that rotate through the seasons, and says the restaurants typically open for dinner, with lunch service tried in some markets.

Signs, rooms and menus.

A themed or full-service restaurant chain carries its identity in more than a logo. The name on the street sign, the lettering on the door, the layout of the dining room, the objects on the walls and the design of the printed menu all work together. For a chain, the same set of cues has to travel from one site to the next, so the brand is often set down as a repeatable kit of signage, colours, fixtures and furniture rather than a single building.

Themed restaurants push that kit further. Their interiors may borrow from a place, a period or a pastime, using collected objects, built scenery, lighting and sound to carry the theme, while full-service chains tend to lean on materials, table settings and menu typography to set a tone. Ownership matters here too, because a restaurant name can pass between companies while the sign above the door stays much the same.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, and how its name, signage, interiors and menus have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a joint venture to Bloomin’ Brands.

The chain’s growth came through a larger neighbour across Tampa Bay. The St. Petersburg Times wrote that Outback had been searching widely for restaurant concepts it could reproduce, and found one on the other side of the bay. On 28 August 2001 the St. Petersburg Times reported that Outback Steakhouse Inc. of Tampa and Bonefish Grill had tentatively agreed to form a joint venture, owned equally, to build new Bonefish Grills, with Outback providing the bulk of the financing. Outback’s chief financial officer, Bob Merritt, compared the deal with the company’s earlier joint venture with Carrabba’s Italian Grill, which had also been a small chain when it joined Outback. Parker told the paper that the founders had planned to grow on their own and either stay private or sell, but that the chance to work with Outback was too good to pass up. English Wikipedia dates the acquisition to 5 October 2001. Merritt told the Times that Outback thought it could bring “capital and growth management experience” to what the founders were doing, and predicted the concept would travel well: “We’re pretty confident we can take it out of this region.”

Outback Steakhouse Inc. later became Bloomin’ Brands, and the Bonefish name stayed within the group. In August 2025 Nation’s Restaurant News described Tampa-based Bloomin’ Brands as the parent of Outback Steakhouse and the owner of Carrabba’s Italian Grill and Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar, and reported that John Bettin had been named president of Bonefish Grill. The magazine quoted Bloomin’ chief executive Mike Spanos as saying the group’s leaders were committed to “our founder’s values,” and said the appointments were part of a turnaround focused on the Outback brand. English Wikipedia gives the chain’s headquarters as Tampa, alongside its parent.

For a design guide, Bonefish Grill shows how one graphic mark can replace a room full of nautical props. Compare Carrabba’s, its stablemate in the same restaurant group, and The Cheesecake Factory. For this guide we use deep teal, sand and brass with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bonefish Grill’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.