Dallas restaurateur Shannon Wynne and his partners didn’t really want to go to Bentonville, and they certainly knew they didn’t want to locate a Flying Fish restaurant there.
But that was before Alice Walton got involved.
Asked what led the businessmen to open a restaurant in the city, the smallest market to have a Flying Fish, Wynne said: “Alice leaning on us pretty hard helped. She flew us up there several times. We really did not want to go to Bentonville.
“But she told us she was going to build this museum, and we kind of went up there in midwinter when it was gray and misty and construction had started, and it looked like an ant bed out on a baseball diamond that was being built. She showed us all these pictures and it kind of looked interesting, but we thought like we were in Mayberry.
“We were polite and we left and told them we would get back in touch with them.”
A Walton friend in Fort Worth — Walton was living near the city at the time — had introduced Wynne and Walton. This friend called Wynne six months later and said, “’Alice wants you to go back up to Bentonville.’ We said, ‘We’re not going to do one, but thank you very much.’ He said, ‘She’s going to fly you up there. What have you got to lose?’
This visit, however, was different. “It was springtime and there was a Wal-Mart convention in town,” Wynne said. “Everything looked different. The museum was coming out of the ground and it looked just a lot different.”
By the third time the restaurateurs visited Bentonville, they were being encouraged to pick out real estate. They still weren’t convinced, however, saying it was “premature,” but they indicated some buildings they liked. Three weeks later, Wynne and his partners learned that one of the buildings they’d liked had been sold.
“So we decided to go ahead and do it because the impact that the museum was having was significant.” That, along with the fact that Bentonville is home to Wal-Mart, led the business partners to decide “it was a risk worth taking.”
Wynne, general partner of Flying Fish Inc., is well-known in Texas business and restaurant circles. His father, Angus G. Wynne Jr., was a Texas developer who started Six Flags Over Texas, and Wynne’s uncle Bedford Wynne helped found the Dallas Cowboys.
Wynne is involved in three restaurant management companies that together operate six different concepts, including the Flying Saucer Draught Emporium, and 30 restaurants throughout the country.
Flying Fish in Bentonville was opened in March 2012, and Wynne said the restaurant is showing a “healthy return.”
“Without that type of participation by Alice and Wal-Mart, we wouldn’t have gone there.”