Aug. 19--STEAKHOUSE OWNER ADDING NEW LOCALES: Bob Sambol spends hours these days focused on his latest ventures: a Bob's Steak & Chop House in San Francisco that will open in January and another slated for next June in Plano. 

Neither decision came lightly. Mr. Sambol, whose steakhouse stands out in a town of big beef, has turned down scores of temptations to open a second Bob's from as far away as Taipei and serious bids to buy a piece of the action for millions. 

He finally said yes to these two offers because they have what Mr. Sambol says are the ingredients for steakhouse success: financial incentives to go into the projects and locations coddled in the comfort of corporate expense accounts. 

The San Francisco restaurant will be in the heart of the financial district as part of a $110 million hotel being built by Irving-based Omni Hotels Corp. The Bob's at the Dallas North Tollway and Legacy Drive will be close to Plano's corporate headquarters row. 

"I figure the train comes through your station only so many times with deals that could really, really change your life," says the 47-year-old proprietor of the cozy spot on Lemmon Avenue that became Bob's nearly eight years ago. "So I've got to take my shot." 

The walls at Bob's are highlighted with sports memorabilia, mostly gifts from famous patrons who dig his steaks. A framed cover of Fortune magazine's Dec. 26, 1983, edition features Boone Pickens with a rifle slung over his shoulder. It's inscribed by the one-time corporate hunter with: "Bob, a few of them got away." 

Mr. Pickens, you see, was just one of many who passed on the "opportunity" to bail out Mr. Sambol when Bob's was sinking early in 1994. If it hadn't been for an 11th-hour cash infusion from Dallas businessman Bill Lenox, the restaurant might not have survived. 

Recently, however, Mr. Sambol's numbers are coming up all sevens. 

On a good Saturday night, he'll feed 600 patrons nearly $40,000 in steaks, lamb, lobster and drinks in a restaurant that seats 260. That makes Bob's among the state's highest-grossing restaurants for its size, with sales expected to reach $8 million this year. 

Bob Kaminski, chairman of Lone Star Park in Grand Prairie, recently quipped that if city leadership had been really serious about attracting Boeing Corp. to Dallas, they'd have wined and dined the Seattle executives at Bob's. 

Says Mico Rodriguez, owner of the Mi Cocina Tex-Mex chain: "Bob is the rare example of someone who took an original story line from another restaurateur and made it better." 

Mr. Sambol revels in such unsolicited praise but doesn't take it for granted. He's had a long haul getting to this point. 

His father owned several bars in Manhattan when he was a youngster growing up in the Bronx. One day in 1965, the 11-year-old went to work with his father. 

"My dad plopped me down at the bar, and the bartender proceeded to give me a Coca-Cola loaded with maraschino cherries. I thought I was in heaven," he recalls. 

Later that day, Mel "How About That" Allen, the famed voice of the New York Yankees, strolled in. "Right then and there, I decided I wanted to be in this business and be just like my dad." 

After two years at junior college in the early 1970s, the 19-year-old went to work for his father, who had bought a family restaurant in New Jersey. Flush with tips that netted him about $500 a week cash, he was quite the party boy. 

So in 1978, when his father decided to sell the restaurant and retire to Florida, Bob was left high and dry. 

Mr. Sambol migrated to a hotel in Miami where "the average age was dead" and took a job as a manager trainee with Specialty Restaurants Corp. that paid a third of what he'd been making. 

He decided it was time to get serious about life. 

"I'm a romantic guy, so I called my girlfriend and said, `Hey Judy, why don't you come down here, and we'll get married?'" he chuckles. She came, and they did. 

He quickly moved up through Specialty's ranks. By 1981, he was based in Chicago and in charge of 16 restaurants that stretched from Kansas City to the East Coast. 

That's when famed restaurateur Arnie Morton asked him to take over his flagship restaurant, Arnie's, which was in the same building as the original Morton's. 

"At that point, I formulated my idea for my own restaurant someday: a combination of an Arnie's with its wonderfully loyal customer base and the original Morton's, which I believe to this day is the greatest steakhouse that ever lived." 

In 1984, his wife talked him into seeing a doctor about a lump in his groin that he'd dismissed because it didn't hurt when he mashed it. 

He still dismissed it after doctors told him it was cancer. He told Judy it was a cyst. 

"This doctor comes out and asks if I'm Mrs. Sambol," she recalls, "and then he says, `Well, thank God it wasn't sarcoma. It was lymphoma, which has a high rate of cure.' And I say, `Wait a minute, all these omas sound an awful lot like cancer." 

When Bob came out of recovery, he asked Judy what it was. She responded, "It doesn't matter because I'm going to kill you in two minutes." 

Downright obstinate and obsessively driven, Mr. Sambol went through six months of chemotherapy and radiation, never missing a day of work. Most people didn't know he was sick. 

"I wore a rug and looked a little goofy," he says, "but the only way to keep your mind off of it is to keep working so you don't do something stupid." 

Such as suicide. He reached for a bottle of pills after two months of being constantly nauseous and deeply depressed. At that moment, his first-born son crawled into the room. 

"I dropped the pills and picked him up," he says, then shakes off this dark mood with, "Well, I got over the cancer thing." 

In 1990, Mr. Sambol joined a partnership in Fort Myers, Fla., to launch a TGI Friday's-like concept, but it fell flat on its face. 

He supported his family for nine months by working 12-hour shifts seven days a week flipping hamburgers and putting umbrellas into drinks at the Tiki Hut poolside bar at the Hilton in Sanibel Island, Fla. 

"That fed me a big helping of humble pie," he says. 

A series of events led him to Dallas, where he met Dale Wamstad, who was relocating Del Frisco's Lemmon Avenue homestead to North Dallas. The two cooked up a deal to reincarnate the steak spot as Bob & Del's Chop House with the odd stipulation that the renamed restaurant couldn't serve filet mignons, baked potatoes, shrimp or lobster, which might compete with the Del Frisco's to the north. 

"Here I am running a tiki bar, and the most successful steakhouse operator in the Southwest tells me he thinks this will work," Bob says. "We open on July 19, 1993, and I'm thinking this is going to be the greatest thing I've ever done. We serve 60 dinners the first night, and it goes downhill after that." 

Six months later, Mr. Wamstad wanted out, asking $150,000 for his stake. He gave Mr. Sambol a year to come up with the money, charging him $16,000 a month in rent and fees in the meantime. 

The good news was that he was free to serve whatever he pleased. 

"The menu wasn't the problem anymore," he says. "Customers were the problem." 

Chef James Rose, who'd followed Mr. Sambol to Texas from Florida, took a $10,000-a-year pay cut and did such unchefly duties as cleaning restrooms and vacuuming floors. 

"Bob worked as hard as I did, so it was easy to stay," says the executive chef. "Besides, we had nowhere else to go." 

Mr. Sambol tried to drown his sorrows one night after customers left -- all 11 of them. He headed home in a stupor, leaving doors unlocked, lights on and music playing. The next morning, when he rushed back to the restaurant, he found everything exactly as he'd left it, including the $600 in the register. 

"We couldn't even get robbed," he moans. "That's how bad it was." 

By mid-December 1994, Mr. Sambol was at the end of his rope and had two weeks left to come up with the $150,000. That's when Mr. Lenox, owner of Circle T Western Wear and a chain of antique stores, stepped to the plate -- despite the warnings of his financial and legal counsel that Bob's was a lousy risk. 

"Everybody said, `Don't do it,'" says Mr. Lenox. But his partnership in the restaurant over the years has netted an "incalculable" return in the millions of dollars. 

That's because Mr. Sambol refused to waver from his vision of a classic masculine steak and chop house. And little by little, the customers came. 

"Steakhouses are all about noise level, energy, smell and feel," Mr. Sambol says. 

So he's entering the San Francisco and Plano markets with both confidence and humility. 

"We're going to show them what we think is a good steakhouse, and hopefully they'll agree," he says. "I just keep telling myself I can always go back to the tiki poolside bar in Sanibel Island if things don't work out." 

-----To see more of The Dallas Morning News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.dallasnews.com/ 

(c) 2001, The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.