Eddie V’s Prime Seafood

Eddie V’s Prime Seafood is a fine-dining restaurant concept centered on prime seafood, high-quality steaks, and a classic cocktail and wine program. The menu features both traditional and modern preparations, and most locations include the V Lounge, a bar and lounge area with live jazz or contemporary music in the evenings that helps position the brand as a destination for special occasions, business dinners, and weekend nights out.

The brand began in 2000, when founders Larry Foles and Guy Villavaso opened the first Eddie V’s in Austin, Texas as a modern seafood house with a steakhouse feel. From that single restaurant, it grew across Texas and into select coastal and gateway markets. A key milestone came in 2011, when Darden Restaurants, Inc. acquired Eddie V’s, bringing the concept under a large public restaurant company with national-scale real estate, operations, and development resources. Since joining Darden, Eddie V’s has continued to open new units while refining a consistent look and feel that often includes dark wood finishes, visible oyster or raw bars, prominent wine displays, and private dining spaces sized for corporate and social events.

As of August 2024, Eddie V’s operates about 30 locations across the United States. The footprint includes restaurants in Texas, California, Florida, Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, North Carolina, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Sites are typically high-profile positions in affluent trade areas, often near Class A office, destination retail, and luxury or upper-upscale hotels. Restaurants tend to be larger than a typical casual-dining box, with multiple dining rooms, a full lounge, and dedicated private-event rooms that help drive consistent evening and weekend traffic as well as group business.

Over roughly the last five years, Eddie V’s has followed a measured but steady growth path under Darden, adding locations in major metropolitan areas and wealthy suburban nodes rather than pursuing broad national saturation. Recent openings and announced restaurants in Cherry Hill, Denver, and San Antonio show how the brand is combining infill in established regions with entry into select new markets. Darden has signaled plans to open dozens of restaurants annually across its portfolio, and Eddie V’s remains part of that pipeline, with growth focused on top 50 MSAs, destination lifestyle centers, mixed-use districts, and markets with strong corporate and hotel demand.

For landlords, brokers, and developers, Eddie V’s brings the profile of an upscale, full-service anchor backed by Darden Restaurants, a publicly traded company with multi‑billion‑dollar annual revenues and a large national operating platform. The concept is oriented around evening and weekend dining, draws high-income guests, supports valet or structured parking where appropriate, and often serves as both an amenity and a traffic driver within mixed-use projects, office-led districts, and high-end retail environments.